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On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

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Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#271

It seems like some other mathematicians (not affiliated with openAI) have also (or close to) done this. A statement was posted about the surrounding events by one of the them: https://cims.nyu.edu/%7Etristanb/statement.pdf Also Terrence Tao's post: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117233528517340774

The allegations of contamination (using Tristan and Levent's work) aren't very well evidenced, but this behavior by OpenAI (from the authors' statement) makes them seem like the bad guys: > I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin…

Their own tweets are also pretty eyebrow-raising:

> One option we discussed was that Tristan could be the lead author on a rewrite of OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes proof. It is in that context that I said “it would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee” because I felt it would be inappropriate for an Anthropic employee to author OpenAI’s work.

Why would you offer another researcher the lead authorship on your groundbreaking paper if you thought you had developed it independently?

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#272

Is this the one that was allegedly based on someone else's actual work & prompts? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605915 https://bsky.app/profile/quantian.bsky.social/post/3muyhwbcd... https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf

Yes, that was the allegation last night. I work at OpenAI, though not on the team that did this, and my understanding is: - we decided to ask our model for Millenium problem solutions because of two reasons: (a) our new model was looking incredibly good and (b) we heard rumors that some Millenium problems had been solved and were curious if our models could solve them (the goal here was not to scoop any particular in…

[deleted]

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#273

Buried under the drama is the fact that OpenAI is claiming that an internal model they’ve been training for less than two weeks is more than twice as capable in mathematics as Astra, which was only made public a week ago. Even if this improvement is limited to mathematics, that is an astounding feat.

Yeah I'm surprised they posted a chart, you would think they would keep specifics like that hidden until they're closer to launch

The chart is as non-specific as could be. It improved in some very vague metric by some amount at different (increasing) levels of training.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#274
post #66

It's great that important discoveries like this can now routinely be accompanies by formalized proofs. The fact that it's being released alongside a Lean proof from Day 1, rather than the Lean proof being released months or years later, is super helpful for verifying that it's correct.

I feel sorry for whoever has to read and understand the solution. It looks like the typical convoluted unreadable mess I see the models generate for software. It might be technically correct, but gaining insight from it is just intellectual hell.

There's an opportunity to build a Lean "optimizer" which automatically simplifies existing proofs.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#275
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel sorry for whoever has to read and understand the solution. It looks like the typical convoluted unreadable mess I see the models generate for software. It might be technically correct, but gaining insight from it is just intellectual hell.

Skill issue. Also lean is meant to be executed, not read.

i think they're talking about the writeup

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#276
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is going to be dramatic in so many different ways. - First off, to reiterate, WOW. - Second of all, when does this end? Are we at the dawn of the singularity now? - People are saying OpenAI "stole" this from the work of an OpenAI user. If so, that's pretty fucked - how can we trust them? - Time to think about retiring from any knowledge work or business? This could be winner-take-all where a leading lab can butt…

2) We are witnessing the intelligence explosion from the first row, wherever this takes us 3) I'm still processing the drama, just found out about it after reading the blog post. If that happened based on private data, that's horrible. If that happened based on public tweets, then it's still abuse of power as OA employees access to compute (launching 10k agents) is quite heavy weight in boxing terms. But apart from A…

Drama aside, this solution would be a counterexample disproving the smoothness postulate, which means that it leads to nothing new unfortunately. We already had working solutions to navier stokes, the only thing we didn't know is if the equations possessed a technical property

Its a bit like solving p = np with a negative result. Its an incredibly difficult problem, but it doesn't lead to anything at all on its own. This is why people are talking about the fact that the solution methodology is much more interesting than the solution - the tools used to crack something like this may lead to solving more useful problems

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#278
From Levent Alpöge : https://x.com/__alpoge__/status/2097383870773748190?s=20

>so far the proof looks more along the lines of another euler blowup proof we had, off of whose ansatz naming we were making really stupid puns like “smooth criminale”, unlike the much better “ideal fluids explode”, Tristan

There are too many ambiguities around OpenAI. Unanswered questions making this ambiguity more.

Why they didn't properly explain to Tristan about usage of their data.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#279
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't they rule it out? Is even OpenAI unable to track the provenance of all of their training data? This is one of the major problems with these enormous closed models, and even most open-weights models, which don't disclose their training process or training data. You can never be sure what went into its training. Did it come up with an idea originally, or is it just plagiarising its training data? Are there ma…

To truly prove some incidental usage data made no difference we'd have to (a) identify any of their de-identified data that came from their usage of ChatGPT, (b) train a bunch of expensive giant models, and (c) ask them all to solve the Navier-Stokes Millenium problem until hitting some level of statistical significance. It's just not feasible to run experiments like this to prove whether a piece of data has an effec…

> identify any of their de-identified data that came from their usage of ChatGPT

"de-identified" seems more of a euphemism than normal in this context, given the very unique work they were doing.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I´m waiting on the other side version, because I know there is no justifiable way to talk to a person like they did. Sociopathic behaviour.

OpenAI version of events conceed some of the words alleged to have been used may have been used https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310

May be unfairly jaded or just well calibrated given the body of evidence, but I can't help but think of another quote about OpenAI leadership:

> Not consistently candid

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