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Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample

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21–30 of 681 posts

Re: Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample

#21
This is the second ChatGPT shared conversation I've seen today that is truly fascinating.

The first one was someone proving another conjecture false by just repeatedly saying "keep going" to ChatGPT: https://x.com/DmitryRybin1/status/2079904005652893709

What a world we live in.

Re: Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample

#22
I don't understand any of the math here, but I had two thoughts. Soon we'll have explainer agents that translate these according to my level so I can, with effort and interest, follow along and stretch my understanding boundary bit by bit.

Two, at some point AIs will be able to use other context like the fact that this is Terrence Tao and not your average Joe and change how it answers, either in tone or structure.

Re: Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample

#23

I'll have a blog post up tomorrow about it but the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample is a very funny cognitohazard for LLM assistants. It's a paradox for modern LLMs: they have enough math skills such that they can easily compute the Jacobian to formally verify the counterargument, but its own knowledge base is locked prior July 19th 2026 where all it knows is that the Jacobian Conjecture is unsolved and a random ch…

I wonder whether when the fact that AIs have started solving conjectures will enter the training data, they will become more confident in their abilities.

Re: Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample

#24
post #2

Maybe it's silly, but from someone who is ignorant on this topics, what are the consequences of this kind of "discoveries"? Is it something "revolutionary" or just another small brick that will pile up until something really "revolutionary" will happen?

To me, this shows that extremely talented and qualified mathematicians (can) use frontier-level LLMs to automate their personal grind-y workloads that would otherwise (probably) take more time to accomplish with natural intelligence.

By itself, no consequence. But over time, provided we keep pumping out talented and qualified mathematicians and keep subsidizing costs, we could maybe hit a breakthrough... somewhere... that has real impact.

Re: Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample

#26
It's crazy how he suggests simplifications over and over and gets led through the finding. Absolutely bonkers how you can use AI to understand something and map it to your own mental map so efficiently, and of course he's most interested in generalizing or finding a simpler sub-result that would explain it.

Just awesome to see new knowledge hit an incredible mind like this. Having these "what if" discussions is what I miss most from JPL and academia.

Re: Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample

#27
post #3
post #2

Maybe it's silly, but from someone who is ignorant on this topics, what are the consequences of this kind of "discoveries"? Is it something "revolutionary" or just another small brick that will pile up until something really "revolutionary" will happen?

"Hey Fable, please generate me the next 1000 undiscovered bitcoin hashes"

You're joking, but perhaps LLMs will find a way to mathematically break the complexity of factorization.

Maybe they'll find a solution where P=NP.

That could really throw a wrench into the whole internet thing.

It seems they need an expert human driver for now.

Re: Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample

#28
post #5

Similar to how Cypher puts it: I know this is “just” next token inference, matrix mult and just software, ie there’s no “intelligence” there BUT, looking at this convo … damn! The fascinating this is that the LLM is not acting as a tool here AFAIk, but very much like a colleague. I have no knowledge of the domain and have only PhD EE level math knowledge, so maybe my bar is too low.

That argument says very little, emergent behavior is a thing in complex systems with billions of parts. Humans can also be reduced to voltage potentials propagating along of tubes of fat and synapses getting rewired.

Re: Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample

#29
I'm watching how Tao uses AI, and it's interesting.

Expand the entire expression, then change the representation to find the core axis. You can't see the axis from just one perspective, so you change the representation. In programming terms, it's like applying multiple domain models. Then break it down into small contract units. Why is it a Jacobian monomial? Why does x satisfy a cubic equation? And so on.

Then swap out the modeling under a hypothesis, assemble it all back together, and verify it through the equation.

This feels similar to modeling in programming.

Observe the whole -> explore better modeling -> decompose local problem -> verify independently -> reason about the highre level structure -> integrate back into the original problem.

This feels similar to when I receive work from a client and write a programming proposal

Re: Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample

#30
Math has some of the most insanely dense and impenetrable nomenclature. I can generally keep my head mostly above water or at least near the surface reading from most STEM fields, perhaps leaning on google/wikipedia a bit, but man, mathematics just so quickly decouples from all common tractable understanding it's insane.

Sorry it's a bit of an aside, but I imagine many other otherwise "technical" folks feel the same unfamiliar sense of total loss like when encountering hard mathematics.

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