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The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

simonwillison.net

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Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#51

Post by KeplerBoy »

l5870uoo9y wrote: post #28

I run a small SaaS[1], like so many others, that uses AI to generate and optimize SQL. Getting this to perform optimally has been a lot of work and now I wonder if OpenAI is outright stealing this knowledge, which without a doubt is highly valuable to them. [1]: https://www.sqlai.ai

SQL is so ubiquitous and the use case so obvious, there's no way they have not already been tracking performance and benchmaxxing on SQL queries for years.

But I don't think openai will bother to release a competitor, the real threat is that anyone with a decent LLM and a harness to try a few queries will land at the same or a better query within minutes.

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#54

Post by georgemcbay »

andersmurphy wrote: post #27
junofan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their privacy policy for normie subscribers says in plain English they use your Personal Data for research. I think it’s pretty unreasonable to use the service and expect otherwise.

You'd think theft would still be illegal regardless of what a privacy policy says.

> You'd think theft would still be illegal regardless of what a privacy policy says.

I wish that were true, but I live in the United States and it is 2026.

The President of the United States rug-pulls memecoin crypto and regularly pardons people like Paul Walczak (who was convicted of massive payroll fraud) in exchange for large donations.

I wouldn't make any assumptions about what is considered theft anymore, at least not when it is being committed by people who have enough money to be above the law.

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#55

Post by caughtinthought »

kzrdude wrote: post #21
caughtinthought wrote: post #5

Basically no new info here, not really sure why this post needed to be written tbh.

On the contrary, a level-headed summary that gathers information from all the different sources is necessary.

Sounds like a great use case for an LLM

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#56

Post by eru »

skylurk wrote: post #47
bob1029 wrote: post #24

> ... we heard rumors that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved. Inspired by these rumors ... I've observed this exact effect last week. I made a discovery regarding a stepwise performance improvement in a codebase. I shared the benchmark results with a peer and within 12 hours they replicated the same. We had both been looking for this for years. I think giving someone hope that an answer exists might as…

> I think giving someone hope that an answer exists might as well be the same thing as giving them the answer these days. If you read the history of major scientific discoveries, this has been the case for a long time. There are many things that were independently discovered by different people at nearly the same time. Once people know something is solved or solvable, it gets a relentless amount of focus.

This seems to be the norm rather than the exception.

On a tangent, the genius of people like eg Einstein is not so much that he came up with all these things: other people were close, but that he was a singular individual that did all of these discoveries, instead of five different guys all making some breakthrough here or there.

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#57

Post by Fordec »

josalhor wrote: post #23

I think this drama was blown up a bit out of proportion. The entire discourse I am seeing online seems to revolve around this: > While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models I mean... yeah? What do you expect? What else can they say? How could you prove a negative in this case? I do not want to comment on specific OAI employee chat messa…

A very simple "these two pipelines don't connect up in our architecture, here's our internal high level network diagram combined with our data ingestion opt-out feature flag that we will stand by in court" as opposed to "yeah, we don't even entirely know how our own customer facing systems are connected to our training pipeline, but it probably didn't happen".

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#58

Post by sk4rekr0w »

jdlshore wrote: post #12
iso1337 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There’s no shilling here. The person who posted the link isn’t the person who wrote the blog.

He is in the HN ingroup of whenever he posts a blog, a prominent HN mod or poster with 1 billion karma will inevitably post it, and so it goes.

It's sort of like the music industry.

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#59

Post by feverzsj »

burrish wrote: post #43

>While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models. What do you mean, as OpenAI employee, you cannot tell that his work has entered the training data ? But also correct me if I'm wrong, if the two mathematician were really close to finish this problem, and their conversation were used by OpenAI, shouldn't the Agent have succeeded way faster/e…

It's almost as if it was actually found by manually written brute-force algorithm running on OpenAI's massive computer cluster.

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#60

Post by avs733 »

bob1029 wrote: post #24

> ... we heard rumors that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved. Inspired by these rumors ... I've observed this exact effect last week. I made a discovery regarding a stepwise performance improvement in a codebase. I shared the benchmark results with a peer and within 12 hours they replicated the same. We had both been looking for this for years. I think giving someone hope that an answer exists might as…

If you believe the totality of the document, there was more shadiness in how OpenAI acted than just timing. Save other things they are accused of, the progression from rumors to replication would attract much less scrutiny. With those in mind timing begins to look suspicious at best.

Would anyone be surprised if major model companies had tagged the accounts of competitor employees for extra tracking? Given the concerns about distillation and bench marking it hardly seems irrational, but how it is used matters quite a lot.

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