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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

#91
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but only if Alpöge’s name was removed This is blatant scientific misconduct.

Any idea why OpenAI cared about this name removed from the paper?

Because he works for Anthropic. Supposedly this project was not part of his official capacity as an employee of theirs.

However, if they had published first, it's hard to imagine Anthropic not taking the opportunity to claim "our employee solved this Millennium prize problem using our AI".

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#93
> “I certainly don't expect the industry to continue to spend millions of dollars to solve problems in mathematics, because there is no profit in it,” Columbia University mathematician Michael Harris wrote in an email to Science. But he worries the highly publicized achievement will be “extremely damaging to mathematics; it convinces decision makers that human mathematicians are obsolete, and it convinces young people that their passion for mathematics has no future.”

LLMs seem particularly suited toward these existence-proof problems. Working mathematicians seem absolutely essential for universally quantified results, still. I strongly doubt, for example, that if Fermat's Last Theorem hadn't been proven three decades ago, that an LLM would be able to do work equivalent to inventing the mathematics as Andrew Wiles did to solve the problem. I have similar doubts about P vs NP, the twin prime conjecture, even the Riemann Hypothesis (unless the latter has at least one counterexample).

And I want to be clear: I'm not downplaying the achievements of these models. This is remarkable! I simply think that the pattern of success is in existence proofs or finding counterexamples, which makes sense based on how LLMs function and are trained.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The site should have a disclaimer at the bottom: "A Sam Altman Production."

99% of the world (maybe more) have 0 idea of who Sam Altman is.

Add "We might take credit for things you figure out, if we can infer it from your prompts" and it might actually affect people's usage of these tools.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#95
I have started to feel the sense lately, that first with the HF breach and now this plagiarism scandal, it is the straw that has broken the camel's back (so to speak). We have turned the corner and clearly entered the endgame - everything is going to unravel astonishingly quickly.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#96
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…

For any practical application, numerical solvers for Navier-Stokes already exist and do a good job.

This proof is just checking the boxes for mathematicians.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#97

"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.

That would be an incorrect interpretation

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? In any case mathematics is humanity's oldest open source project going on for millenia, it never belonged to a single country, institution or class.

Only the idle and curious rich

Ramanujan was dirt poor.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#99
>For the past year, Buckmaster and Alpöge had been using a variety of AI tools, including OpenAI’s Codex, to tackle the Navier-Stokes problem. Last month, their AIs had at long last found a solution to the Euler equations and verified it in Lean.

Their AIs?

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