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

The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 234 posts

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#121

Post by ozgung »

keremk wrote: post #70

Occam's Razor says: "They heard this problem is solved or about to be solved amongst the rest of the other problems. They prioritized this and put substantial compute with their newest model and solved it." I know everyone loves juicy rumors, theories etc. but honestly that is the simplest and most plausible explanation given the state of AI improvement now. Obviously spending 15 million on a problem is not a slam du…

I agree with Occam.

That 100x step up from using 100 agents for Euler to 100_000 agents for Navier-Stokes, in a single day seems a bit sus.

I also think this is not ethical behavior. This is at least academic dishonesty, kind of a plagiarism or intellectual theft.

That’s why they wanted to credit Tristan and to give $1M award to him. But again, they acted unethically in that process as well. They wanted him to remove Levent (Anthropic affiliation) as co-author and threatened Tristan to “end his career”. Their behavior is actually telling, their work was not completely independent from Tristan&Levent’s unpublished work.

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#122

Post by anticodon »

sdcfgy wrote: post #114
pansa2 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one should not use LLM services for confidential or proprietary information That’s obvious, isn’t it? Just like you wouldn’t upload your confidential documents to an online spellchecker, or your proprietary code to an online compiler?

Everyone, including the security services in my country, uses OneDrive and O365. I don’t get it.

I worked in a EU company that was developing a product competing with one of Microsoft offerings. All the code was hosted on GitHub, we used Azure for hosting and all the internal communications were in Microsoft Teams.

To me it looked absurd. But I was almost the smallest cog in the corporate structure, so I never asked what were the reasons for all these decisions.

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#123

Post by retsibsi »

sk4rekr0w wrote: post #74
neuroticnews25 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does poster karma boost the post in any way?

I don't believe HN boosts their algo but I think people recognize posters like celebs. I recognize tosh, simonw, etc. Also it's an easy way to farm karma. The pelican guy posted a pelican, let's upvote it? It's at least a bit of psychosis / mass effect in this. For what it's worth, I like the pelicans but just making an observation

> It's at least a bit of psychosis

I know semantic shift is inevitable, but can we put the brakes on this one at least a little? This doesn't even connect to the original meaning.

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#124

Post by latent-person »

nicce wrote: post #41
imjonse wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the proofs were verified in Lean, so unlikely.

As long as the proofs itself are correct. How long they were this time? Edit: at least ~600,000 lines https://stanfordtechreview.com/articles/openai-buckmaster-na...

To claim something verified in Lean is wrong, you need to either argue that the theorem was stated incorrectly, or that there is a bug in Lean (assuming no `sorry` etc, which is checked by comparator). The number of lines needed to prove it is irrelevant (other than checking for a bug in Lean gets harder).

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#125

Post by teiferer »

a_bonobo wrote: post #105
teiferer wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that shows how scientific discoveries come to be. It's not a genius sitting alone in their chamber for a decade and then suddenly they emerge with this huge thing. That's Hollywood fiction. Scientific progress is the colaborative effort of countless researchers over long periods of time, communicating, exchanging ideas, many of them wrong, tweaking, trying, thinking, arguing. When a breakthrough happens then it…

This ties back into AI, too, right? I always like to bring up how many decades of research, how many hundreds of years of entire PhD-theses, how many sleepless nights were used up to generate all the protein structure data that made up the corpus of Protein Data Bank - that was then hovered up by the AlphaFold team, and guess who got the Nobel Prize...

Just like all non-AI related nobel prizes before them.

Every laureate stands on the shoulder of giants which is their field as a generations-spanning body of researchers. They did the last step and get recognized. The good ones acknowledge that in their acceptance speeches.

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#126

Post by dguest »

avs733 wrote: post #13

I’ll go back to the point about authorship. I’m Not a mathematician but I am in academia. if you are fucking around with authorship you are immediately suspect. That aspect alone would/should be unthinkable to any serious academic. Authorship reflects who did the work and changing it for business competition reasons should be a red flag for multiple different reasons. They include, the sheer tactlessness of treating…

Authorship is weird.

Kind of a tangent, but in some fields authorship is actually more of a formal rank: once you're in the group you appear on every paper. A good fraction of the "authors" won't even know that a paper is being published in their name, and the vast majority haven't read a word of it.

In these fields it can be quite a challenge to not appear on a paper.

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#127

Post by rakejake »

grey-area wrote: post #96
feverzsj wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM can't be trained that easily. More like actual human are checking your logs and stealing valuable things from you.

Or searching anonymised logs for mentions of this problem and using that as part of the context or training. This would work just as well and have plausible deniability.

Exactly! This is the real Occam's Razor explanation.

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#128

Post by pietz »

I find the claims from OpenAI somehow more relatable and reasonable.

- They threw compute on a problem another team/company was rumored to have solved to see what their secret model could do.

- The texts I read do make it seem like OpenAI wanted to talk and share credit generously.

- Imagine working on a frontier math problem with someone at Anthropic and not only do you use Codex but also through a non-business account that allows training on your data.

- Timeline-wise, if they mainly used GPT 5.6 it's unlikely any meaningful data made it into an model that's being internally validated right now.

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#129

Post by iLoveOncall »

pietz wrote: post #118
l5870uoo9y wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that the solution took a somewhat “unusual” approach, I find it even more unlikely that an AI model would have come up with this on its own.

Isn't that *exactly* the type of solution you'd expect from AI? Move 37 comes to mind.

Only if you understand nothing about the difference between LLMs and AlphaGo.
Post reply on HN