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

How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

science.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 242 posts

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#61

Post by ltononro »

mrbungie wrote: post #27
ltononro wrote: post #16

Does it matter who gets the credit at this point? Both used AI to do 99%+ of the work. So... do machines have ego?

They represent different AI usage patterns. OpenAI wants everyone to believe that it was done with a practically autonomous network of thousands of agents with little to no human intervention for 88 hours, while Buckmaster/Alpöge were using AI in a more guided way for months. If OpenAI actually used anything from Buckmaster/Alpöge work they would be misleading the public.

Agree! Not sure I believe that Buckmaster/Alpöge were guiding the AI. This is just their way of saying that they had something in the process and deserve merit.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#62

Post by 4ndrewl »

JohnKemeny wrote: post #43
paxys wrote: post #3

> Navier-Stokes is one of six “Millennium Problems” on a list compiled by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. Seven, not six. One is solved already, but is still a millennium problem.

Yes, that's a strange mistake to make.

One of the other millennium problems is counting to 7.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#64

Post by digitaltrees »

ltononro wrote: post #16

Does it matter who gets the credit at this point? Both used AI to do 99%+ of the work. So... do machines have ego?

Asking the question in the right way may be 99% of the work. And the fact that openAI is effectively snooping on users and then outspending them to announce a break through is just gross.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#65

Post by lolakutty »

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.

Yea, strongly agree. I think this is going to back-fire spectacularly. They better start preparing an apology...

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#66

Post by ltononro »

ltononro wrote: post #55
usrnm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess, you don't use AI for work? Otherwise, why should you be paid for it? Should you only be paid for the code you actually wrote yourself?

I do. But the difference is: do I go around bragging that my agent worked for 88h to solve a problem? Where is the credit coming from? Is it coming from the: I was the first one to think about throwing a prompt: "Solve Riemann Hypothesis" and it turns out that by luck of the non-deterministic behavior of the agent, it got right? Wow, that is a lot of merit really. Congrats... Sorry the sarcasm, but really your point…

If the machine is highly non-deterministic, it is a matter of luck to get to the result, therefore using agentic swarms to optimize chance.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#67

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

vbezhenar wrote: post #14
jibal wrote: 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.

I would think it would have the exact opposite effect.

Why would anyone use OpenAI models for anything commercially valuable, or where secrecy is important, when it appears that if OpenAI "becomes aware" that you are doing so they may try to compete with you?

Not only did OpenAI, by their own admission, rush to re-solve Navier-Stokes once they heard the rumor that it has been solved (the rumor being that it was Anthropic that had done it), but they are leaving the door open ("we cannot rule out that") as to whether the model they used to do it had been trained on the anonymized date from the researchers who's approach they ended up copying.

Terrance Tao has recently said as much for mathematics - that there appears to be a trend (not just this Navier-Stokes incident) of the AI companies going after math problems wherever there is an "rumor" of progress, and that he thinks this may sadly result in breakthrough mathematics being conducted in secret to avoid this.

The rush to steal another researcher's thunder is bad enough, but it also appears that one of OpenAI's employees acted in a very thuggish manner to try to threaten the professor who had been working on this not to publish and to co-operate with their telling of the story.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#68

Post by harhargange »

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…

I’m pretty sure that OpenAI has some of the best mathematicians prompting the models and analysing the results. While they are marketing as if the model solves problems themselves.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#69

Post by ltononro »

digitaltrees wrote: post #64
ltononro wrote: post #16

Does it matter who gets the credit at this point? Both used AI to do 99%+ of the work. So... do machines have ego?

Asking the question in the right way may be 99% of the work. And the fact that openAI is effectively snooping on users and then outspending them to announce a break through is just gross.

Is it really? If I ask my swarm of agents to read about every relevant stuff about NS problem online might me more than what any researcher can prompt the machine these days.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#70

Post by pama »

Other than the undeniable breakthrough in math, the important point is the ability to orchestrate 10k agents to productively work on a single problem, which creates options:

> 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.”

Post reply on HN