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On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

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701–710 of 1001 posts

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#701
The problem that I want to see them tackle is formalizing the classification of finite simple groups.

Everyone uses the classification. Nobody has great confidence in the proof. Nobody understands it. There are attempts to reprove it.

If it can be formalized, that would demonstrate that AI is ready to formmalize all of mathematics.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#703

Sad turn of events for our world. After watching the behavior of the most senior OpenAI researchers on twitter, I feel even less confident in them as a team to be shepherding this much capital and compute. The dark forest awaits..

1. What does the dark forest have to do with this? Because "the most senior OpenAI researchers" are shitposting on social media, we've an answer to the Fermi paradox??? 2. The dark forest is fun for scifi stories, but is mathematically bunk anyway https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-dark-forest-hypothesis-is-... https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/1l06cnk/cool_w... https://www.projectnash.com/aliens-the-fermi…

the projectnash link claims it's mathematically valid, the noahpinion link says that it's invalid and has a marvellous proof that the non-walled section is too small to contain.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a wrong interpretation. Physicists have a shit-ton of models that produce "aphysical singularities", they just work around those to get meaningful answers anyway. This is a whole trope and stereotype. Some of the most successfull and accurate predictions in all of physics come out after you discard a bunch of singularities. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization Nobody who actually works in fl…

Whether or not ways exist to work around the singularities, that they exist is surely of note. Before von Neumann formalized QM people were still doing QM, okay fine. But it's wrong to then say von Neumann was doing no physics of note.

"Does there exist a pathological combination of smooth body forces and initial conditions for this set of PDEs, where singularities appear, which by the way is completely impossible to actually create in the real world unless you are a literal God?" is a question of math, not physics. This is a hill I will die on.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#705

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…

There are lots of startups creating labs that can be managed e2e by agents. That will connect reasoning to the physical world and dramatically speed up the plan, experiment, reflect loop beyond what humans currently do in science R&D.

Maybe. Maybe not. Look at AI drug design - it's not really speeding up the important part - drug trials. There isn't really a coherent plan to use AI for the most complex part of drug discovery at all.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#706
post #107

Something I've been going on and on about for months now and no one seems to listen. LLMs today are allowing _anyone_ to access cross-discipline knowledge that was previously entirely inaccessible without a) extremely deep pockets or b) a massively talented and varied team. In fact, contrary to what the masses seem to think LLMs are actually _better_ at hard cutting edge physics/math problems than they are at fronten…

I can't find a good way to articulate this point to other people. What the LLMs lack in depth in a speciality field they more than make up for in breadth!

It feels like the "tide is rising" where the minimum level of skill applied to every aspect of everything will inexorably rise to "whatever an LLM can do", which is already pushing past PhD level.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#707

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…

Lol what? Everything is computation. The natural sciences will soon start breaking too. I will concede that AI seems likely to not invent a "research program" anytime soon. It has no taste

No, it won't. How do you verify some causal claim in biology?

The reason AI is doing so well in math proof writing is that it can verify every idea it has, quickly.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#708
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…

It's incredible to me that every single time there's a new model people scream "singularity" from the rooftops and every time they are wrong. This is an impressive result, but there is absolutely zero evidence of "the singularity".

It is not reasonable to not believe anything unless there is "evidence" (narrowly construed as an observation incompatible with the negation of some state of affairs). Beliefs have a wide spectrum of characterizations, and not all belief must wait until publicly corroborated evidence is available. Some events defy evidence and we can and should use experience and reasoning to infer unobservable states of affairs.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

over 5 days, you couldn't achieve that level of testing and communication with humans on such a complex problem in that amount of time. some might go so far as to call this a country of geniuses in a data center.

In a way, I think you have it backwards. Two mathematicians, through insight and thought, wrote out the proof over 1-2 years. It took OpenAI a cost of $15m and with 10,000 subagents; that's around 60-120 mathematician's salaries ($250k-125k salary) for 1 year. And, given now the cloud that OpenAI may have just "interpolated" (aka stole) the result, it's even more of a bear case for AI.

> cost of $15m

The retail price is not the cost.

Not to mention that the exponential plummeting cost of tokens means that that $15 million will be a "pocket change" within a decade or less: https://a16z.com/llmflation-llm-inference-cost/

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>Just because something is legal and permitted by terms of service doesn't mean it's morally right. What are you expecting OpenAI to do exactly if these mathematicians voluntarily submitted their prompts into ChatGPT's training data? Are they supposed to manually review all their data to make sure competing mathematicians didn't accidentally leave the "submit prompts" toggle on? Or were they supposed to not try to so…

To me it’s morally ambiguous… if you hand parts of your thinking over to a tool like this (knowing full well the terms of service), of course the tool makers will want to claim some credit, and they do deserve it. But the bigger question to me is the scientific one: did their new model arrive at this result because it had closely-related training data from a human, or did it extrapolate to this line of thought on its own? The answer says a lot about how valid their claims of “AGI” are vs. a very fortuitously cherry-picked example.

It would actually be a really interesting study, if they would ever be willing to be transparent about this, how the result differs with and without his conversations in the training set. How quickly it arrives at the result, whether it takes the same approach, etc.

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