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On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

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Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just pushes knowledge work further up the ladder, toward larger and more complex problems. If there are no knowledge workers, who is going to interpret these results, validate them, decide what matters, and put them into practical use? Rather than eliminating knowledge work, advances like this could create entirely new layers of problems to solve and opportunities to pursue, which will create even more jobs and…

> This just pushes knowledge work further up the ladder, toward larger and more complex problems. You really think it makes sense for you to be higher on the "solving complex problems ladder" than the machines that solved fucking Navier-Stokes? I envy your self-confidence.

Maybe I should have been clearer. My point is that solving something like Navier–Stokes just pushes knowledge work further ahead, onto a new set of bigger and more complex problems. Navier–Stokes is a Millennium problem today, but once problems like that become solvable, they can open the door to entirely new classes of problems we haven’t even thought of yet.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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One of the wild things about how these models work is how often things that aren't sampled directly end up a variable in the model via secondary signal.

They aren't keying queries by phase of the moon. But if, for example, more people talk about camping outdoors when the moon is full, and they're using conversation topic and timestamp as signal in what eventually becomes training data, it's not impossible the model has learned something about moon-phases.

That's the kind of thing that's hard to prove had no impact on an answer.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#284
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…

> As a parallel example, can we prove the phase of the moon had no impact on the NS solution? No, not without a bunch experiments run at different phases of the moon.

That reads as incredibly dismissive and condescending. What makes you think you’re in a position to communicate like that when engaging on such a sensitive topic?

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#285

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

> "When we learned that they had Euler but not Navier-Stokes, we offered to let them go first, to suggest that they should be the ones to get the prize, and optionally for Tristan to be the lead author on a rewrite of the OpenAI proof. We felt it was challenging to offer the same to Levent (an Anthropic employee), who was not willing to talk or coordinate with us anyway. We were open to other solutions."

What an admission! "We tried to defraud Alpöge out of sharing the Millenium Prize (that we don't dispute he might actually deserve), for no other reason than he works for our competitor and that inconveniences us".

I thought Tristan Buckmaster's allegations sounded fantastic; and then 'sama just came out (tweet's ~30 minutes old) and admitted to all of them. Wow!

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#286
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so tired of this "It's just marketing!!" commentary. An AI model just proved one of the top 3 unsolved problems in mathematics, they have a Lean certificate showing it's valid. How much more evidence do you need that these models are actually highly capable?

They are highly capable, no doubt about that, but: 1) We don't really know how they arrived to this result except that they had a lead and that they threw millions of compute at the problem. The article is written in a way that makes you believe that it was just an agent loop with little human intervention, but without any evidence. 2) If the threats are to be believed, it is concerning how far they are willing to go…

1) The article is written in a way that states clearly they threw a lot of compute at the problem. In api cost millions of dollars. 2) Millenium Problems have been the goal every AI company wanted to achieve since their diffusion, all companies have thrown a lot of resource to solve these problems, as they are very famous and scientists spent a lot of time trying to solve them. The first company to solve it will remain in history, despite all of you finding excuses about it.

Regarding product and credibility normal people have a completely different view about LLMs, most don't even know difference between models and probably don't even care about Millenium problems, but care instead if chatgpt can solve their day to day problems. This is just them trying to have the throne on the AI companies space, outside it this result won't matter.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#287
post #231

This is undeniably epochal, but I can't help but notice that this is yet another example of AI disproving rather than proving something. Is this just a coincidence, or does AI slightly struggle with proving theorems?[0] [0] Struggle relative to its ability to disprove, not struggle relative to people's ability to prove theorems.

I think you really have to squint to call this a disproof lol

It seems obvious what GP meant. It is, once again, an explicit construction (“disproving” that every initial state does not develop a singularity).

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#288
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…

A careful reading of "we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models" could be saying that yes they trained on it but they don't know if that training data resulted in an "improvement" to the model. That is, they can't rule out that the only reason the model found this solution was because it had been trained on this approach. The term ruled out is very o…

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Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#289

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

A company who made their business out of stealing intellectual property from the entire mankind, stealing other researchers' unpublished work, how surprising, really.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#290
It would be nice if one of these models would produce a novel theory or advance the field in a positive direction.

Most (all?) of the big discoveries have been counterexamples, which is just sort of a systematic tearing down human ingenuity. I know that counterexamples are an important part of progress and discovery, but it just feels bad to me.

But I'm not a mathematician, maybe I'm totally misreading the vibe.

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