OpenAI just wants to win | The Verge
OpenAI just wants to win | The Verge
摘要: AI
OpenAI just wants to win
Two mathematicians at the heart of recent controversies tell The Verge how AI giants’ ‘childish’ rivalries
正文
OpenAI just wants to win
Two mathematicians at the heart of recent controversies tell The Verge how AI giants’ ‘childish’ rivalries are upending the field.
Robert Hart
Sep 12, 2026, 11:00 AM UTC
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images
OpenAI just wants to win
Two mathematicians at the heart of recent controversies tell The Verge how AI giants’ ‘childish’ rivalries are upending the field.
Robert Hart
Sep 12, 2026, 11:00 AM UTC
Robert Hart
is a London-based reporter at
The Verge
covering all things AI and a Senior Tarbell Fellow. Previously, he wrote about health, science and tech for
.
OpenAI has spent the last few years planting flags across the increasingly difficult terrain in mathematics. This week, it claimed one of its biggest prizes yet: a solution to a legendary Millennium Prize problem. In normal circumstances, this would have been celebrated as a historic achievement.
Instead, many mathematicians have watched OpenAI’s relentless advance with growing unease. To them, the company appears less like an enthusiastic newcomer than an impossibly well-resourced interloper, charging into problems they have dedicated their lives to studying with little apparent regard for long-standing norms or the consequences for those left in its wake. At the heart of that unease is a sense that OpenAI is doing mathematics for different reasons. Mathematicians want to advance the field. OpenAI wants to win.
Mathematics is not normally this dramatic, so how did things get this bad?
This week,
The Verge
spoke with more than a dozen mathematicians, including Tristan Buckmaster and Andreas Thom, who are at the center of recent controversies surrounding OpenAI’s work in the field. Even those skeptical of the most serious allegations described a field shaken by the tech giant’s conduct and fearful of what it might do next in its determination to trounce its rivals.