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How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

science.org

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Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#41

Post by LiamPowell »

huurtehoog wrote: post #10
afavour wrote: post #7

The core section: > However, communications quickly became contentious. According to Buckmaster, OpenAI offered to give him sole authorship on the Navier-Stokes solution—but only if Alpöge’s name was removed from the work and if the write-up would acknowledge the problem had been resolved by an internal OpenAI model. Buckmaster refused, in part because he was troubled by the question of what OpenAI's system had actua…

So, this company wants everyone and every organization on Earth to use their software, and reserve the right to then tell anyone how the resulting work can be published and credited? Real solid business model there, how could it ever fail?

That's not what the comment you're replying to or the article says. I feel like I'm going crazy reading comments here and elsewhere, am I not reading the same articles as everyone else?

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#42

Post by mrngld »

rrhjm53270 wrote: post #9

My impression: the re-aristocratization of scientific research seems inevitable.

Your local trailer park was never going to be able to afford sponsoring high energy particle physics experiments projects that hollow out a mountain and use up a ton of xenon to try to detect a stray particle. High end science has required deep pockets for a long time.

But given the cost of a college textbook this is a pretty silly complaint to lobby against a subscription that's $200 a month, in the context of the cost of a variety of other materials and tools out there. (If you think that's expensive you've clearly been lucky enough to never have to deal with commercial software costs) Also not sure how quickly this stuff uses up limits; $100 or even $20 subs might be enough for students. And if a student is scrappy and figures out that Luna can meet their needs then I'd imagine Luna is effectively unlimited on some of these subs. Luna Max scores pretty high.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#44

Post by rakejake »

rsfern wrote: post #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 bas…

Yeah, I think you can't just throw money randomly at problems and expect results unless you know a line of attack that can get you all the way. OpenAI chose the line of attack only after it became known to them via rumors. They "front-ran" the researchers.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#45

Post by JohnKemeny »

sherburt3 wrote: post #40
paxys wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah solving a Millennium Problem is totally equivalent to calculating another digit of pi.

Its called an analogy

It's one of the seven most important problems in mathematics.

Pick a better analogy.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#46

Post by lemoncookiechip »

This right here, or at least the thought of this, is why in the not so far future, businesses can't (won't?) be using these LLMs services.

You cannot risk companies like Anthropic, OpenAI or their business partners like Microsoft having unfettered access to proprietary data on your company/businesses.

It it likely that they or rogue employees will use the information to make a profit? It's pure speculation, but I'd say more than likely, and we will never hear about it or read it on the news unless there's whistleblowers in high enough positions to know about it.

Assuming you and your employees aren't careful with what data you share, they will have intimate knowledge about your company from files and conversations logs. Likely personal user data too which they'll gladly create databases to link to and create extensive profiles on you, your employees and your businesses.

It's not far-fetched to see them leveraging insider information shared with LLMs to play the stock market, leveraging data against competing businesses in other markets they might want to explore, and likely a bunch of other things that are escaping me right now as I write this.

At the end of the day it's on those people for sharing such sensitive data, but it's not like these AI companies are innocent and won't gladly exploit every little byte of data without telling you, we know it happens.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#48

Post by kenjackson »

timmg wrote: post #23

I think it was a pretty questionable thing to do by trying to front-run these researchers even if they didn’t make use of their techniques. The fact that they may have inadvertently “borrowed” their work via training data makes it much worse. OpenAI’s behavior here — even if you only consider [their] side of the story — was (at best) in bad taste.

Strongly agree. And as one of the major AI companies, this is extremely tone deaf. If they saw a human (even if assisted) was making great progress on a major problem then you give them space. You don’t swoop in with millions in token spend to scoop them. There are tons of important problems where humans aren’t making traction - please go solve those.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#49

Post by pickleRick243 »

sherburt3 wrote: post #34

"Breakthrough" to me would be like Isaac Newton inventing calculus to calculate pi. This feels more like $12MM in tokens was spent to add another digit to pi using the old way.

I'm not sure if you meant it this way, but this is more an insult directed at mathematics, not openAI.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#50

Post by JohnKemeny »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #36
elternal_love wrote: post #22

Hmm, is the formal verification through? Lean just asserts no errors in the proof, but like can prerequisites not be fullfilled?

Are you asking if it uses additional axioms of `sorry` in the proof? It's easy to check that it doesn't by compiling it and telling lean to list the axioms.

It's highly non-trivial to confirm that the theorems written in Lean are actually the same as the Navier–Stokes (non-)theorem.
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