Simons Foundation launches $15M AI effort for mathematicians, backed by Anthropic and OpenAI

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Simons Foundation launches $15M AI effort for mathematicians, backed by Anthropic and OpenAI

The Simons Foundation, Anthropic, and OpenAI will commit $15M in combined funding and resources to help mathematicians evaluate AI-assisted results and set shared standards for AI use.
The foundation will manage and award the money through an open call for proposals, funding workshops and initiatives instead of letting any one company or institution direct the work.
Anthropic and OpenAI will also provide AI tools and computing resources to researchers the foundation supports, reaching beyond mathematics into basic science.
The foundation previously funded development of the Lean proof assistant, which the article says made AI-assisted proofs possible.

Hacker News opinions

So $15M of OpenAI and Anthropic tokens, won't this just encourage more model use that started the issue in the first place?

OpenAI's part is funding, separate from compute. It's not tokens.

Tokens aren't free, so if you want scientists to get them, you're basically asking AI companies to subsidize research.

Simons also funds arXiv and a lot of grants across maths and sciences. I don't see much of an agenda here.

Jim Simons founded Renaissance Technologies and has put money into machine learning for a long time. These small academic investments pay off many times over for him.

Those top names like Tao will get the cash while early-career students get nothing. It's like donating to the Node.js foundation instead of the packages people actually install.

Those guys won't pocket it. It'll pay PhD students and postdocs, same as all academic grant money.

Mathematicians criticized the labs' methods and even called for a boycott of their results. Now the same labs are funding the same academics? That's an ironic move.

Honestly this reads like a fig leaf. Self-serving PR for the labs after the backlash over their math results, and the foundation took the easy yes.