Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

openai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 1001 posts

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#521

Post by contubernio »

curt15 wrote: post #454
charm137 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The scientist allegedly making that request comes from a machine learning background. Perhaps he's not familiar with the culture in mathematics regarding authorship. That sort of squabbling over author priority would be unconscionable to mathematicians.

Bubeck is familiar with how publishing works in mathematics.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#522

Post by sensanaty »

tedsanders wrote: post #357
Analemma_ wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In OpenAI's case, if they were genuinely unsure, they wouldn't have said anything. "We cannot rule out" means they absolutely 100% for-sure did look at the existing prompts and bootstrapped from that, and they are trying to get ahead of the disclosure with this weasel-wording.

Also possible: we're 99.999% sure, but a lawyer said to be safe and strictly accurate, we should stick in a sentence in saying we can't be perfectly sure, since it's infeasible for us to prove it. I promise you that if we took their work from ChatGPT and stuck in a bunch of weasel words to give the opposite impression while remaining technically true, I would quit on the spot. (I work at OpenAI.)

Nice damage control bud, too bad the veil's lifting and everyone's seeing what you sociopaths at OpenAI are really like

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#523

Post by jarenmf »

hdivider wrote: post #112

My take: 1. It shows what even this wave of AI can actually do. 2. I wish it were done by different folks, ideally under some kind of public control like NASA research or the NPR model. 3. Keep in mind: natural science is different. It's not always a matter of computation. Computer science folks often struggle with this -- but this virtual world here does not actually exist. Everything is physical, including informat…

I think problem with natural sciences is that it is not so easy to verify solutions to problems - there are always countless competing explanations for the data which is also often noisy - I find AI to lack the "common sense" when working with data from physical measurements .. it somehow has no touch with reality and doesn't have a feeling of the data like a domain scientist

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#524

Post by recitedropper »

AlexErrant wrote: post #397
recitedropper wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I elaborated on my use of "dark forest" in another reply. We're headed for a dark forest--not amongst interstellar civilizations, but in intellectual work. I agree that we have not solved the Fermi paradox; I disagree that comments highlighting immature behavior from people who wield enormous power in our world are unproductive.

This clarification substantially changes the flavor/nuance of your OP; may I suggest an edit (assuming the locktime hasn't passed)? Separately, I disagree that intellectual work has ever been free of "dark forest"-style secrecy. Scientists everywhere have worried about being scooped; AI just magnifies that (as all tools have; e.g. Leeuwenhoek lenses). And thirdly, if you want to make a stronger case for "I feel even…

I don't comment on HN much, and I don't really expect HN comments to hold to rigorous standards. This forum is more casual than other places on the internet where people expect heavy citations. I also wasn't expecting this to blow up, although it is interesting to see that a lot of people react to this announcement with a negative sentiment.

I appreciate your upholding of ideals, and since I respect that, I will honor with final replies:

1. Locktime has passed.

2. Yes, intellectual work has always had elements that incentivize secrecy. If you want to say we were already in a "dark forest", so be it. My suggestion is that the multiplier AI adds to the possibility you get scooped is a step-change, and therefore we now enter a new "dark forest".

3. This is a big thread, and the twitter antics are well-documented, so I would assume someone else has cited them. If not, I think most are aware at this point that the online antics of AI researchers, especially when announcing or citing mathematical advancse, have regularly been childish.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#525

Post by baq »

itvision wrote: post #116

There's something sinister or crazy good in the article. OpenAI already has a model that is at the very least twice as smart as Astra. Oh god.

They always have and will for the foreseeable future, as will Anthropic and other labs which manage to ascend to the frontier, pretty much by definition. It’s exactly the same with hardware vendors - by the time you can buy the product, the lab is working on something you’ll want to buy a few years from then.

> Oh god.

Yes, a very reasonable reaction.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#526

Post by dyauspitr »

frotaur wrote: post #177
alasano wrote: post #21

I don't know about you guys, but I'm hyped about the future. Cure all illnesses Utopia or Robot Wars Dystopia, both are pretty exciting.

Not sure about the dystopia... Had a similar thought when covid was beginning 'wow pretty exciting, just like in the movies'. Turns out actually living some terrible catastrophe is only fun in the movies.

I had a lot of fun during Covid. I loved the working from home. The fact that most outdoor places were sparsely populated, jobs were plentiful and prices were low. Covid was awesome.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#527

Post by elwell »

mewse-hn wrote: post #78

"we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models ." What a landmine sentence to bury in this report, you can't rule out your models were spying on other researchers?

Isn't this a proof that the usage data is truly "de-identified"? If OpenAI could prove that "their usage" influenced the finding, then it wouldn't be de-identified. (Also, it's a bit disingenuous to trim the "While unlikely," prefix.)

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#528

Post by [deleted] »

concinds wrote: post #465
hkmaxpro wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Sam Altman and Sebastien Bubeck admitted they only want Buckmaster to be the lead author on a rewrite of the OpenAI proof. https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310 A wake up call for using OpenAI models. If you discover something with their model and you work for a competitor, they “felt it would be inappropriate” for you “to author OpenAI’s work”.

Their own claim is that they wanted Buckmaster without Alpöge to lead a rewrite of OpenAI's Navier-Stokes work, not of Alpöge-Buckmaster's Euler work. No one can know if that's correct without proof but I don't know how you're reading it so differently.

[deleted]

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#529

Post by sebzim4500 »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #269
colinhb wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

IIRC that happened with evolution. In the initial presentation of Darwin and Wallace's work on evolution (presented with their consent by someone else) Wallace was described as the primary author since he was planning to publish first.

Of course, no one understood that presentation so it was Darwin's later book that everyone remembers

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#530

Post by piker »

"... The point remains that there is a substantial opportunity cost in converting a historically productive and motivating problem (such as Navier-Stokes regularity) into a mere viral social media post advertising some benchmark progress, rather than actually advancing the field and developing the next generation of both problems to ask, and people to work on them."

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117219101339291693

Post reply on HN