The withdrawn papers were not lean verified nor claimed to be.

Can you point to where that defense has been made?

Have you got a link to someone pointing it out? It looks like they're still going through formal proofs so likely found the problems that way.

But can the others even be "disproven", given that they apparently are so messy and awful that no humans can follow them? Shouldn't the onus instead be on OpenAI to prove that they're right, instead of hundreds of mathematicians wading through slop?

Exactly, I was glad to see these withdrawals, its a natural part of a healthy ecosystem of scientific review, hypothesis, claim, test, refute, extend, withdraw, its the heart of science.

IMO If you take out all the stupid human aspects mostly related to fear, egos, etc, we should brace the imperfect and helpful tools, whatever they are, improve them so they are as easy as possible to review, and keep that core scientific discovery loop going

I’m conflicted. I guess we’ll see what the final total is once an enormous level of unpaid human effort is expended verifying the AI outputs. A little sad if that’s the future of math.

It kind of reminds me of when tech giants open source a project as a means of putting a positive spin on abandonware. “Here’s the source! Any problems are yours to fix now. You’re welcome”