Post #2550221

2026-04-13 08:13 UTC

Hereby announcing that it is common knowledge in the formalization community that Math Inc are a bunch of thieving scumbags and somehow manage to be even worse than all the other fucking assholes who pretend to build artificial intelligence. They will steal your work to try and pass it off as their own, ruining your career and then tweet about how the Economist thinks "their AI" revolutionizes mathematics. All the while erasing your own contributions that actually got everyone most of the way there in a collaborative fashion, in favour of some obscurantist nonsense that is worthless at advancing the state of science, and for all we know involves no actual large language model and might just be a bunch of people forced to do all the work themselves while pretending it was machine generated and just "polished up a little". Do not work with Math Inc, do not listen to Math Inc, do not trust them to do anything but advance their own interest in the most short-sighted all-destructive fashion, and do not make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Jesse Han.

Replies (3)

@Vierkantor@mastodon.vierkantor.com 2026-04-13 08:44

For context, this is about the Economist writing that Math Inc's language model formalized Viazovska's sphere packing theorem. While in reality this was a project led by Sidharth Hariharan, and run by Chris Birkbeck, Seewoo Lee, Bhavik Mehta and Maryna Viazovska. These people's hard work, done in the open with Math Inc pretending to contribute until recently, built the structure and got most of the way there with the proof. Until Math Inc decided to scoop them, for the reason that their capital allowed them to write unmaintainable code at a faster pace than researchers could write useful proofs.

Open ##2883958
@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 2026-04-13 08:18

@Vierkantor@mastodon.vierkantor.com have experienced this exact form of colonialism from simon peyton-jones in 2018

Open ##2883959
@crazazy@tiny.tilde.website 2026-05-17 20:47

@Vierkantor@mastodon.vierkantor.com fwiw before this I had never heard of Math Inc and also I think that everyone who is like me likely doesn't have a reason to not keep it that way (All double negations fully intended, by the way)

Open ##2883961