Sam Altman sympathizes with mathematicians, but says OpenAI’s math onslaught won’t stop

After months of bombarding mathematicians with a relentless stream of AI-generated results, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he sympathizes with researchers struggling to make sense of it all. But he has no intention of stopping — and hints there could be much more to come from the company’s stockpile of discoveries.

“I think, on net, the world deserves to understand how the universe works,” Altman said during an episode of the Cheeky Pint podcast released Thursday. “But I do have empathy for the method.”

His comments mark one of the first times the OpenAI chief has directly acknowledged the company’s impact on mathematicians, following a string of genuinely impressive AI-generated results whose chaotic , poorly communicated rollouts have left researchers bewildered and struggling to keep up, even amid widespread excitement about AI’s potential as a tool for discovery.

Altman argued that the public’s right to new scientific knowledge “outweighs” the disruption caused by OpenAI’s releases, though he acknowledged the company needs to improve how it communicates its findings. “I feel unequivocal on this point: Humanity deserves fundamental knowledge, and we should not be sitting on a major fundamental science discovery,” he said. “The world deserves that.”

Mathematicians speaking to The Verge have repeatedly criticized OpenAI for how it announces its results, citing inadequate attribution, little context, and insufficient verification. Researchers say this has left them doing the painstaking work of checking and making sense of their findings even as the company presses ahead with more. This month alone, OpenAI has released hundreds of mathematical results , often with little more than brief writeups that researchers have described as poorly written and hard to follow.

Yet OpenAI is now facing criticism for doing precisely what Altman says it should not be: sitting on potentially significant findings. Mathematicians and scientists speaking to The Verge this week said they are frustrated by what they see as OpenAI’s gatekeeping of research , following the announcement of three major breakthroughs in mathematics, physics, and computer science. Details for one of the claimed results — involving Yang-Mills theory, the mathematical foundations of modern particle physics — have not been released publicly. OpenAI says it is due to the recommendations of a hand-picked group of experts it consulted on how best to release it. The practice runs directly counter to the advice of a previous group of mathematicians the company consulted , but forms part of what the company says is a new approach to communicating its findings.