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On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

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Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#531
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah well, its easy to do if you steal someone elses work and then try to threaten them into staying quiet about it Edit: OpenAI have now admitted they were training on prompts at the time they made their breakthrough: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/11723647135247030...

what's there to admit? they always said they do it and there's a way to opt out. you are making it sound more dramatic than it is.

This is textbook plagiarism, scooping their result knowing that the research was part of the training data

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#532
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.

A proof is not like a program. The goal of a program is to "do the thing", thus you can make the argument that it doesn't matter what the code looks like as long as its works right. But the goal of a proof isn't to "do the thing" (where "the thing" is just to print Yes or No), it's to communicate. An unintelligible proof is really just a first draft.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#533
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication from their last couple of published articles[1][2] is that they think they’ve achieved “recursive self improvement”. [1] https://openai.com/index/research-acceleration-view-inside-o... [2] https://openai.com/index/an-alien-mind/

Compute will always be the bottleneck even if this were true.

As a statement of fact divorced from context, this is of course true, but it's worth putting it in context of what small-medium scale models have been achieving recently. Many of the most recent releases from Chinese labs are almost on par with trillion parameter models from less than a year ago (edit: despite being small enough to usably run on prosumer hardware). It seems clear parameter efficiency can still be improved dramatically.

In which case, maybe we don't need as much compute as we might expect. I hesitate to say "to reach a singularity" because it's kind of hard to define how that works out. Even intelligence probably hits some scaling limits eventually (e.g. speed of light related restrictions on how far it can scale, or how quickly it can expand).

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#534

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.

Can someone explain if i understand this correctly: Are they saying that they started training this new model on August 28th and then started using it on September 1st? Does training a new model only take 3 days?

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#535
post #361

Questions: can new research like this be done using publicly available models? Or will access to internal frontier models provide a big boost?

Publicly available models are pretty good but seemingly cannot compete with these Astra++ internal-only models.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#536

> While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models This is the crux of it. If Tristan's work and insights were not used to train OpenAI models, then this just looks like a case of hyper-competitive academic sniping that has been going on for decades (check out Watson and Crick!) accelerated by AI as a tool. But there is one huge question: di…

> But there is one huge question: did Tristan opt out of model training for his ChatGPT and Codex sessions? If the answer is no, then this seems fair game.

Just because something is legal and permitted by terms of service doesn't mean it's morally right.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The x-axis label of the chart is test-time compute. Doesn't this relate to inference ("thinking level") instead of training?

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#538

Can't help but shake an unsettling feeling about all this, frankly. I engage in some limited mathematical research and will often use any one of the latest frontier models to check some ideas. Lately, only the OpenAI models have been giving me a temporary message that says something like (paraphrasing from memory), "We're thinking extra hard about your request before we answer. You can choose another model to answer…

Hi! I work at OpenAI. If you are using Codex, can you use the /feedback form on that session to help us improve this?

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#539

For full context, here's the HN thread from the other side of the "Concurrent Work" section: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605915 Unlike the vanilla read of the OpenAI press release, it is much more unfiltered and outlines some particularly aggressive behavior by specific OpenAI employees

Which seems to be entirely true by their own admission! [0] Both the comments about him risking his career and about Levent's authorship seem to have indeed occurred.

> 2) I never ever asked for Levent to be removed from authorship of his own work (as indicated by my text). I was surprised to learn during the call with Tristan that they had only solved Euler and not Navier-Stokes; after learning this we brainstormed possible paths forward. 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. Importantly it was admitted that internal Anthropic models had been used in their proof of Euler blowup; I therefore felt I could not consider Levent to be an independent academic. Another option I wanted to propose (but got cut short) is to offer access to our internal model so that they could try to finish their proof and bridge the gap between Euler and NS. Again I did not know how to navigate giving access to internal OpenAI IP to an Anthropic employee.

> 3) To reiterate it plainly: as my text clearly indicates, and as I said during our call, OpenAI's intention was to do everything possible to celebrate their mathematical achievements and the heroic efforts that they made on Euler. In the call I was immediately met with a litany of slander, including direct threats that if we were to announce Navier-Stokes he would immediately go to the press with a barrage of unfounded accusations. I refuted all these accusations but he replied “there is nothing you can do, I simply do not trust you”. I was confused why one would turn an incredible source for celebration (of their achievements!) into such bickering, which is when I said that I did not understand why one would risk their career [over unfounded accusations]. Genuinely, at that moment, I was trying to care for him and do a last ditch attempt to get a chance to give them all the credits that they deserve. I deeply apologize for this extremely poor choice of words, it is the opposite of what I was trying to convey. (I should say that I retracted them on the spot by the way.)

https://xcancel.com/SebastienBubeck/status/20973794116915163...

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#540
post #307
post #52

People had joked a couple years ago "Well if they solve a Millenium problem it's AGI"... Well here we are.

Yeah well, its easy to do if you steal someone elses work and then try to threaten them into staying quiet about it Edit: OpenAI have now admitted they were training on prompts at the time they made their breakthrough: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/11723647135247030...

lol, the "other work" was also probably 95-99% AI generated. By a similar breed of OpenAI (and some Anthropic) models, as well.

I dont know why this monumental achievement is being drowned out by some arbitrary drama. No matter which way you slice it, AI solved this problem. Doesn't matter if it was some internal OpenAI model, or whether it was Astra + Fable.

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