Live data from Hacker News

The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

simonwillison.net

151–160 of 235 posts

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#151
post #112
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People talk. If you have a breakthrough solving one of the most famous problems outstanding, you're going to tell people. You'll say, "Don't tell anyone", which they will ignore because they get a rush and perceived status by sharing it. So then they tell someone, along with "Don't tell anyone", etc. It's a small enough world (both in academic math, one at Anthropic) that you get to OAI in very few hops.

"The route to the Clay problem through a smooth force, options c and d in Fefferman’s statement of the problem, is the route Luis and Diego opened and the one Levent and I had quietly chosen to attack. Almost nobody else I know of was working on it. It is not the direction one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement. When I heard “forced,” it was a bright red flag." We know that OpenAI traine…

And deliberate or not it is still plagiarism by the sound of it.

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#152
post #109
post #14

My take home from this entire drama is that one should not use LLM services for confidential or proprietary information as they all seem to be run by assholes. And you’re sending them everything you are doing. Would you send your lab notebook to an asshole? Hell no. I say that as a mathematician (on paper) who perhaps surprisingly doesn’t give a crap about the problem itself.

> 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?

Or you wouldn't write confidential emails in Outlook and have confidential conversations in Teams. Obviously. Right? Right?

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#153
post #148
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s fishy though that they heard one of seven problems was about to be solved and threw perhaps 15 million bucks at the right one. [Edit: they said "two of": "On Tuesday, September 1, we heard rumors that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved. .. we launched an effort ... on all open Millennium Prize problems".]

Why in the world is that fishy? Isn't that exactly what almost everyone would do given that they wanted to see how capable their model is and the tense competition they have with Anthropic right now? Stealing impressive headlines from your competitor is pure gold.

If they were willing to spend 105 million it, perhaps. But that would be surprising. It’s fishy because they spent something like 15 million on the right one.

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#155

> The discovery is somewhat overshadowed by accusations of skulduggery from Tristan Buckmaster [...] I think you should not say that. Buckmaster did only state his version of events and was very clear on that he did not make any accusations at all. To quote from his statement pdf: > I am not accusing anyone of anything.

But we all know that is code for 'something wonky happened, and it wasn't me'.

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#156
post #146
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 have a similar story, but perhaps even stranger. I work for a startup. We often bring a wooden arcade with us to conferences as a marketing gimmick. The arcade runs a single side-scrolling video game. You're running from a monster and dodging obstacles. The goal is to survive as long as possible, and your result is measured in meters. There are always a few competitive guys who spend the entire conference taking tu…

I wonder if it's the same with the sub 2 hour marathon which was broken this year (it certainly was with the 4 minute mile).

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#157
post #146
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 have a similar story, but perhaps even stranger. I work for a startup. We often bring a wooden arcade with us to conferences as a marketing gimmick. The arcade runs a single side-scrolling video game. You're running from a monster and dodging obstacles. The goal is to survive as long as possible, and your result is measured in meters. There are always a few competitive guys who spend the entire conference taking tu…

Reminds me of amateur table tennis. There is a strange dynamic where you down regulate your performance unconsciously when the opponent is playing worse and vice versa.

Could be described as some physical form of this effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

The term would be conformity / normative social influence.

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#158
post #64

I mean this is just the logical end game. The company/ies that control the uber mind will devour ALL useful or valuable work. Unlimited intelligence at unlimited scale means the value of humans for knowledge work goes to zero. We will eventually not have meaningful access to the uberminds because we will be pointless. At which point our Silicon Valley luminaries will really have no choice but to extinguish as many of…

Fortunately, there's plenty of competition between AI labs. Not all of them are even in Silicon Valley.

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#159
post #61

I always thought it was enough to switch off the "Improve the model for everyone" setting on chatgpt.com: "Allow your content to be used to train our models, which makes ChatGPT better for you and everyone who uses it. We take steps to protect your privacy." But apparently there is also an entire completely different route "Do not train on my data"? Does this mean that before I submitted the "Do not train on my data"…

The last time I checked there was a loophole — if you provide feedback in-session (responding to “how are we doing” or “which prompt is better”) then they can use that feedback + relevant context. Relevant context for chatgpt might include memories / other sessions. That may not be the only loophole.

That in itself is a dark, dark pattern. There should at the very least be explicit warnings for users who have checked “do not train”; or they should not be presented with such dialogs.

Re: The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#160
People are focused on the drama but the problem showing is the data. This is the elephant in the room and I am surprised that openai can be that stupid with it.

How can openai do this, what is being claimed, at the scale of their entire userbase? If they do this only for particular sessions then how do they sieve through sessions for the good stuff?

How are sessions stored, how are they processed, how much storage and how much compute is used in these pipelines, how economical is it, how fast are the requirements on the storage on the compute growing as userbase grows and generated data grows.

All these questions are far more pertinent than the navier-stokes, but i can only imagine all at openai doubling down on this "very important" mathematical milestone.

Post reply on HN