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How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

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Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#13
post #6

OpenAI apparently used Buckmaster and Alpöge‘s work w/ Codex to bootstrap “their” dis-proof. https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf

And according to that team OpenAI only started asking their own model these questions after those submissions had occurred. So OpenAI had these critical clues and info before they started. If OpenAI did or did not use that to produce their own “proof” is an open question, but OpenAI hasn’t definitely denied it.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#14
post #4

> OpenAI, meanwhile, says its experience with Navier-Stokes could open the door to solving puzzles with more practical relevance. “We are now able to spend millions of dollars on a problem that we really care about and that really matters: developing new materials, finding cures to diseases,” Bubeck said. “All of those things that we have been talking about for a long time—now they seem to be at our fingertips.” Eh?…

He may be hinting that solving these complex mathematical problems will boost OpenAI clients' confidence and encourage them to spend millions of dollars on solving other complex problems.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#15
post #4

> OpenAI, meanwhile, says its experience with Navier-Stokes could open the door to solving puzzles with more practical relevance. “We are now able to spend millions of dollars on a problem that we really care about and that really matters: developing new materials, finding cures to diseases,” Bubeck said. “All of those things that we have been talking about for a long time—now they seem to be at our fingertips.” Eh?…

Yes it is they all require intelligence.

Navier Stokes is a test of how high the intelligence is.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#17

Moving forward, I can't imagine other mathematicians wanting to have this kind of experience. So there has to be a shift away from these services.

If you mean move to products with ZDR policies, OK, very fair and I agree. If you're talking the equivalent of carpenters should give up pneumatic air guns because hammers are more authentic, then that's silly. These are tools, and like any tool how effective they are can come down to how well you use them.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#18
Regardless of what you think of the priority dispute issue discussed on sibling threads, I’m highly skeptical of the closing quote that this Navier Stokes result means that the same approach of casually spending a few million on agentic computation is going to solve end to end materials design or drug development.

Those problems can’t be formally verified with an automated theorem prover. We have a lot of physics based simulation tools, but they tend to focus on small subsets of the full design problem and they make limiting approximations because otherwise they’d be too computationally expensive, or we just don’t have the right data to parameterize them beyond describing qualitative behavior. Agents are helping accelerate research in these fields but I think it’s mostly a different class of problem that’s a lot harder to specify and verify

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