"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.
Inventing calculus to calculate pi? I don't think that ever happened...
How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy
101–110 of 242 posts
Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Should they give up pneumatic air guns if the company that supplies then can then control what you build with them, how you build with them, and secretly copies all your designs for their own use. Sure its a good tool, but its also becoming a trap.
So in some very weird way, this is similar to right to repair vs John Deere.
Or is it just capitalism doing capitalism stuff?
Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy
#103I 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.
Borrowing the work of others to replace them without crediting is the model of current AI companies.
They just used that occurrence as a PR stunt but it isn't worse than the others done at scale every second.
Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy
#104"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.
Inventing calculus to calculate pi? I don't think that ever happened...
Trust me bro that's how things went down
Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy
#105The 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…
> but only if Alpöge’s name was removed This is blatant scientific misconduct.
IIUC, the accusation was not to try to remove Alpöge from the paper he wrote with Buckmaster solving the "easier" conjeture, but to exclude Alpöge in the followup paper where Buckmaster review the OpenAI solution of the "full" conjeture.
For comparison, if you offer me to collaborate in a paper about Algebra I may agree to go alone, but if the paper is about Quantum Chemistry I have to piggyback a few coworkers because we are collaborating in that topic for a long time and I already discussed may of the topics and I may even discuss the new paper too.
Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
Ah, I missed that part, thanks!
Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy
#107> “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 peopl…
It would be good if someone made a list of allresults obtained with AI so far just to see what kinds of problems AI excels at. Are there any that aren't of the existence-proof type?
Reductively, math can be said to be either problem solving or theory building - it seems the latter is a much harder thing to do right now.
Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy
#108Regardless 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…
Working with AI on science (not LLMs though), couldn't agree more.
Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy
#109Regardless 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…
>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 Do you think it is possible that better math will lead to better physics models?
Yes, definitely! There’s a long history of this and I think there’s tons of opportunities for more. Both for improving the exactness/physical fidelity of models and for developing new approximate theories and simulation methods
Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
> [the Open AI rep] twice asserted that he wanted Levent removed from authorship, and said it would all be simple if only it were not the case that, and it was so annoying that, Levent works at Anthropic.
Later on the author claims that the OpenAI rep threatened to ruin his career if he didn't go along with them.
Worth noting that there were two versions of the problem:
- the proof in the equations with viscosity (which OpenAI claims to have solved), and
- the proof with no viscosity (which Tristian and Levent solved)
What is confusing is that if OpenAI can prove their independence from Levent and Tristian, they could take full credit for proving the viscous version of the problem. Offering to give one author credit for something they proved seems like a strange choice: if nothing else it seems obvious that it would drive a very deep wedge between the two authors of the non-viscous version.