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by YeGoblynQueenne 11 days ago
No, I think it works the opposite way. Until there is an article somewhere that describes what happened, if there is one, all we have to go by is that some guy posted a counter-example for the Jacobian on X, with a vague allusion to using Fable and without any further information. Assuming and guessing anything about e.g. the method used at this point is just raising the noise level.
1 comments

No one can figure out where you're coming from here. If the human solved a significant open problem without relying on AI, don't you think they'd have claimed the credit for themselves?

The suggestion that a human, working at Anthropic or elsewhere, did the hard work needed to disprove the Jacobian Conjecture yet chose to claim falsely that their AI did it, amounts to an extraordinary accusation that requires extraordinary proof.

> If the human solved a significant open problem without relying on AI, don't you think they'd have claimed the credit for themselves?

You'd likely make a lot more money if Anthropic paid you a couple million to release it as a Fable discovery. For that matter, if "I solved it" bragging rights and CV candy is that important, then why not just publish the counterexample without mentioning Fable?

I was initially a bit skeptical, as it seems very convenient that this discovery came from an employee of the company that was able to take credit for it. When I saw no real prompt was published, that was even more suspicious. Some recent mathematical discoveries included the prompt and session [1]. Why not include the prompt? That and the thought the model used could be incredibly valuable information for the field of mathematics.

I'm not even saying Fable didn't do it, and my attitude might be different with other companies, but Anthropic has so much obvious nonsense marketing going on (their AI welfare experts for example), that I think the burden of proof should be expected to be on them here.

1: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a55aa50-b484-83ea-85c0-c7e7b4bda4...

I guess? But I didn't say anything like that.

>> No one can figure out where you're coming from here.

No, I think it's just you and I think that's because you have preconceived ideas about the only possible positions that people can assume in this debate. I'm sorry, of course, because that's not conducive to productive dialogue, but it's not my fault. I think what I wrote so far is very simple, no technical jargon, no tortured metaphors: all we know is a guy posted a Jacobian conjecture counterexample on X thanking another guy and Fable for it but without explaining what that means, and there's no reason to assume anything else besides that very limited amount of information at all.

I'm a research mathematician.

I can see that you're arguing in good faith, and indeed I have a lot of respect for anyone willing to argue an unpopular position. That said, I do find your suggestion to be completely farfetched.

The Jacobian Conjecture was one of the most notorious open problems in algebraic geometry, something that generations of grad students have daydreamed of solving. I've seen more immediate buzz around the Jacobian conjecture than around any other mathematical breakthrough of the last five years, at least. For example Terry Tao, arguably the most famous mathematician in the world, dropped what he was doing to study Alpoge/Fable's counterexample in detail, and wrote this blog post:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/07/21/a-digestion-of-the...

For Alpoge to have solved it on his own, and then falsely claim to have used AI? That's like an athlete winning an Olympic gold medal, and then falsely claiming to have cheated and used illegal steroids. I agree that it's not completely out of the question, but it's beyond the bounds of human behavior that I can reasonably fathom.