Live data from Hacker News

On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

openai.com

291–300 of 1001 posts

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#292

madness. which will be the next to fall? if i had to bet i would guess birch and swinnerton-dyer, but i'm no expert

No idea about which is more likely, but I'm rooting for Yang-Mills. It's absurd that fundamental physics has formulated its most precise currently known theory way back in the seventies and since then, even a tiny subset of it can't be proven to be actually well-defined. If we got out of that morass then something good would come out of this at least.

Of course, as with all of those, it's about the broader program, e.g. section 7 here (https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf), where Scott Aaronson wants to ask about whether quantum computers using quantum field theory could gain any speed advantage over regular quantum computers, but can't even formulate the question because quantum field theory is mathematically ill-defined.

Just solving Yang-Mills because that's what the prize is attached to would be useless.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#293
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't a priority dispute, the more concerning allegation is that OpenAI may be training their models on prompts that mathematicians were using to solve this problem, and then surprise surprise OpenAI were able to replicate that work in their latest model What we're really looking at is seemingly a massive plagiarism scandal, which especially brings a lot of the past results into question If OpenAI is training mode…

If you're alleging that they don't actually have a highly capable model and the work they're attributing to it was actually plagiarized from human mathematicians, well, that would be big if true, but I'd be inclined to take the other side of that bet. With most previous splashy AI results, others have subsequently used the model to do other things around the same difficulty level. Also, it would still be necessary to…

The issue is that if OpenAI is training on prompts generally, what we really have is the first fully automated luxury plagiarism machine. In that it isn't able to genuinely solve problems, but merely steal the work that other mathematicians have been putting into prompts, and regurgitating that to other users as its own work. That makes them incredibly less useful as research tools

The fact that this plagiarism scandal exists underpins the idea that there's actually a mass theft going on, and that these models aren't nearly as capable as is it would seem

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#295
post #18

> Our goal in releasing this result is to report on the substantial progress of our AI models. We do not intend to claim the Millennium Prize for this result. Does OpenAI have a policy of not claiming math prizes like this, or is this them trying to avoid any concerns (right or wrong, I'm sure we will hear more in the future) about how they got there?

>Does OpenAI have a policy of not claiming math prizes like this Wouldn't be surprising if they did. The prize money isn't worth the almost certainly negative PR.

I don't see how it would be negative PR. If anything, the love these breakthroughs and use it in their PR campaigns.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#297
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting that Tao's post says the authors had "significant AI input" but are reworking them into "acceptable form". Either way, it seems AI was involved.

Of course AI was involved, you'd expect most mathematicians and researchers to use AI nowadays. This drama is about AI achieving impressive outcomes with little to no human intervention, as that would be signalling AGI.

> This drama is about AI achieving impressive outcomes with little to no human intervention

That's not at all what the drama is.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#298

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.

Astra was trained more than two weeks ago.

The internal model they mention is different from Astra.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#299

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…

> (the goal here was not to scoop any particular individuals and we were looking at many problems beyond these)

That is your opinion, but the optics of that should raise for you some flags. OAI could have waited (how long is a task left to the ethics committee) to see how the rumors panned out. Right now the optics look a lot like "we don´t care there is a 1/7 chance we one-up a human researcher by reacting to this rumor immediately, might makes right"

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#300

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…

It's astounding that the thought to dissociate one of the mathematicians from the proposed publication was driven by their corporate institutional affiliation - and that that exclusion was suggested by a scientist themselves! This is like a researcher from CMU saying to an NYU researcher that their collaborator, being from MIT, is a problem - this is as ridiculous as that!

Progress in humanity's knowledge now has to play second fiddle to narrow corporate interests as IPO timings near (both of which wouldn't exist anyway if generations of mathematicians hadn't paved the way for AIs to become as good as they have).

Post reply on HN