“Exponentially exploding,” mathematician Thomas Bloom told me by phone, describing the flood of new results in his field. Little did he know that hours later, OpenAI was going to post 722 mathematical manuscripts an unreleased AI model had produced.

The firehose of new work lends new urgency to the question: How is AI changing mathematical discovery? In their race for headline-grabbing breakthroughs , AI companies typically do not disclose their methods and data. That competition among AI companies threatens to overwhelm human collaboration and understanding.

This tension had been playing out in miniature on a website Bloom runs that tracks progress on more than 1,000 problems originally posed and collected by Paul Erdős , one of the 20th century’s most prolific mathematicians. Here, people used to collaborate to discuss open problems, or ones for which the best solution either hasn’t been found or isn’t known to the greater math community.…