I bet you enjoy when a peer asks you to find the issues in a fully AI generated PR that’s 95% of the way there.
Also “real mathematicians” aren’t the people who “math belongs to”, you’re a mathematician if you do math, that’s it.
1. In OpenAI's case, they dumped 1.8 GiB of Lean proofs on the world. I don't think they've done anything ethically wrong by doing that, but it's the exact opposite of "commit by commit". In fact, I'd say human mathematics has been much closer to "commit by commit", usually using smaller results as stepping stones.
2. You can have "commit by commit" without formal provers like Lean. Just keep your text in a Git repo.
It’s better to just publish something that you think is correct and if you find out it’s incorrect, try to fix it later.
My point is just that if a handful of these proofs are later revised or retracted, it’s really not a big deal.
There's a lot to hate about the academic world, but the solution isn't spewing out terabytes of crappy half-baked results.
2. Why shouldn’t math progress happen in the open, commit by commit? Why is it so horrible if a proof is 95% of the way there but we later find that it needs to be refined? Mathematics previously was optimizing for an antiquated publishing and distribution scheme. There is no need for the first print to be correct. We have the internet now. We can and should publish incomplete results and correct things on the fly. Maybe mathematicians would have solved some of these problems years ago if they didn’t hide incomplete almost solutions in their filing cabinet because it wasn’t yet ready to be published.
You don’t hate the pageantry of mathematics and academics enough.