1. "The creation of slop mathematics and the exacerbation of a market-driven arms race. Undergrad participants may lack the expertise to carefully verify the results they produce. Participants are not required by the rules of the competition to communicate their results on ArXiv after the event is over. It will again fall to the mathematical community to carefully verify hastily-produced AI-generated results." No one is forcing mathematicians to do anything here. Math academia has to decide for itself how to adapt verification labor norms in the era of cheaply produced mathematical outputs. And isn't the ArXiv *non-requirement* better for keeping it safe from unverified outputs? 2. "Intrusion of corporate interest. Events like these provide further financial and social leverage for AI corporations over mathematics. The goals of these corporations are not necessarily aligned with the aims of scientific research. As an independent scientific community, it is incumbent upon us to engage critically with AI companies and their tools. It is doubtful that such critical engagement will be incubated at the Mathathon." Sorry but math academia does not have a monopoly on mathematical practice. As labs become increasingly mathematically productive, they do, in fact, an interest in engaging with aspiring mathematicians. Trying to prevent them from interacting with undergrads is foolhardy. 3. "Conditions unlikely to foster mathematical understanding. As most mathematical researchers would agree, forty hours is not enough time to deeply understand, solve, and communicate a problem. The industrialized production of AI-generated mathematical content on extremely shortened timescales does not add value to our community. Such activities in fact carry broadly negative impacts." One does not become a research mathematician in 40 hours, no matter how they spend it. This would be a brief exposure to an essential modern tool to supplement their 4-year math major curriculum. 4. "Damaging misinformation about research mathematics. This event is likely to feed into detrimental narratives about our research community. As a case in point, the website of the Mathathon explicitly asks “What is the role of a mathematician when AI can solve conjectures faster?” The claim that AI can solve conjectures faster than human mathematicians appears both motivated and empirically dubious." Grasping at straws. Someone in the future might make a bad narrative because of this 3-day event? That's an argument? All the other comments are paternalist bullshit convinced they know better than undergrad math majors how they should be engaging with the changing landscape and deciding for them that they will be harmed by $20k in AI credits to explore what has quickly become an essential tool for math research. Y'all should be ashamed of yourself for signing this bullshit.

Yesterday I was in Austin, TX to announce the Airbnb Housing Accelerator, a $250 million commitment to help get more homes built. Airbnb started because of a housing problem. My roommate and I couldn’t afford our San Francisco rent, so we rented out airbeds in our apartment. Today, housing is unaffordable for millions of people around the world. If you step back and ask why housing has become so expensive, the biggest problem is pretty simple: we don’t build enough of it. America is short more than five million homes, more than all the housing in New York City and Los Angeles combined. We build fewer homes today than we did in 1950, even though the population has doubled. Airbnb has been part of the housing debate, and we understand why communities have concerns. Dedicated Airbnb listings are a small share of the housing supply—about 0.5% here in Austin and 0.3% across the U.S. Restricting short-term rentals is an understandable response, but the evidence shows it doesn’t address the underlying problem. New York City effectively banned Airbnb, and rents have risen about 30% since then. Austin took a different approach and passed reforms that made it easier to build more housing. Rents there are down 18%. Every city is different, but Austin is a clear success story. We believe building more homes is essential to making housing more affordable. So we asked ourselves: what can Airbnb can do to help? We found a few places where we can. Today, around 750,000 homes in the U.S. are ready to break ground, but are stuck because they can’t get the final piece of financing. That’s where we can help. We’re doing four things: 1. Putting $250 million behind housing projects that unlock $5 billion in development. 2. Supporting local housing advocates working to modernize zoning, speed up permitting, simplify building codes and reduce unnecessary costs. 3. Creating a $5 million Housing Innovation Prize for technologies that can make homes faster and cheaper to build. 4. Launching the Airbnb City Index to make it easier to see which cities are building housing, becoming more affordable and adopting policies that work. Our first project is in Austin. We’re investing $6.4 million to help build 201 affordable apartments in St. John, a neighborhood where the land has sat empty for nearly 20 years. The community fought to turn this lot into affordable housing and won. But construction stalled for nearly five years because the developer was a few million dollars short. Airbnb came and played a small part to unlock this project. None of these Austin apartments will ever be on Airbnb. Short-term rentals aren’t permitted. We’re investing anyway, because the goal is simple: help build more housing. We’re starting in the U.S. because it’s the market we know best. I want to prove this works here before taking it further. But housing affordability is a global problem, and I hope we can eventually take what we learn here and apply it globally. This is new for us. We’ll get some things wrong. And $250 million won’t close a five-million-home gap on its own. I know there will be skepticism about this, and that's okay. Airbnb only works if communities trust us and feel good about our presence in them. We can’t ask people for that trust. We have to earn it. The best way to do that is to help solve problems in the communities where we operate. That’s what the Housing Accelerator is about. Brian