How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy • Hacker News Board

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#121

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 12:43 PM UTC

Gabrys1 wrote: post #102

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It is capitalism doing capitalism stuff, but more fundamentally technology is allowing for more centralized control of more things by fewer people. Regardless of ideology, increasing concentration of power has bad outcomes for people (except the ones in power).

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#122

Post by y-curious » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 12:44 PM UTC

aenis wrote: post #57

greggoB wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read Buckmasters statement, he specifically notes that they used the paid subscriptions, iirc.

The paid subscriptions have opt-out for sharing data for training purposes. I think it's on by default.

I don’t know because I use Anthropic, but I would eat my hat if this was on by default.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#123

Post by y-curious » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 12:46 PM UTC

elgertam wrote: post #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 peopl…

P=NP is for when both AI shops decide they want to go bankrupt LOL

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#124

Post by zarzavat » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 12:48 PM UTC

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #89

Regardless of the end result, OpenAI's behavior would be a career-ending ethics scandal for a human mathematician. This bit alone would be a career-ender. > 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. I wonder if an a…

Many mathematicians would be willing to end their careers for $1m. What makes this so sad is that OpenAI spent more than that for this empty PR stunt.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#125

Post by plaidfuji » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 12:52 PM UTC

The whole thing reeks of the desperation of an unprofitable venture-backed startup looking for its next PR win to keep the wind in the sails.

But I think what’s being overlooked in the race to claim absolute credit is that both sides ultimately relied on a LLM (and one of OpenAI’s at that). Either a human researcher made a breakthrough discovery with the help of Codex, or the latest GPT model made a breakthrough with the help of human training data, or a little of both… either way it is undeniable that LLMs have quickly become an integral part of R&D workflows and are accelerating research.

This would be a major win for any normal company. You could even build a bigger collaboration with this guy, give him a big budget and push for extensions to this preliminary result, and in return do a write up on how he uses your model in his workflow. Huge PR win. What this says to me is that their valuation is so astronomical that they feel the only way to justify it is to demonstrate a fully autonomous discovery bot… which it simply is not.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#126

Post by HarHarVeryFunny » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 12:59 PM UTC

vbezhenar wrote: post #118

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Anthr…

Because AI supposedly provides a significant advantage over not using AI and those who would trust OpenAI might get a significant edge.

They might, or they might just get out-spent and scooped by OpenAI.

This isn't the way you build trust.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#127

Post by jgalt212 » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 12:59 PM UTC

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…

> Those problems can’t be formally verified with an automated theorem prover.

It certainly seems like any problem that is amenable to reinforcement learning will be solved.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#128

Post by ndriscoll » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 1:00 PM UTC

elgertam wrote: post #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 peopl…

I only have an undergrad in math, so very little understanding, but I'd be pretty surprised if it couldn't do forall just as well. Like, say it found this counterexample which relies on axial stretching or whatever approach. Then it already knows how that made the proof work, and can use it to try to prove NS has smooth solutions modulo this particular kind of defect (so it could make some statement about cohomology, or some additional constraining equation). Or if that doesn't work, then it can find a counterexample, which we've established it's good at. Then repeat until you've characterized what does work. The various defects, along with being defect free, become definitions. Now you have a theory.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#129

Post by magicalhippo » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 1:00 PM UTC

y-curious wrote: post #122

aenis wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paid subscriptions have opt-out for sharing data for training purposes. I think it's on by default.

I don’t know because I use Anthropic, but I would eat my hat if this was on by default.

It's opt-out for personal plans, and opt-in for business pla s and API.

This is explained on the page[1] linked to from the privacy section of the pricing page.

[1]: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5722486-how-your-data-is...

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#130

Post by Arodex » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 1:01 PM UTC

olmo23 wrote: post #24

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…

> While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from [Buckmaster and Alpöge’s] usage of our products helped improve our models. Well yeah, if you use the free product they train on your data, ... I thought this was widely understood?

Then OpenAI should acknowledge that they can't prove they solved the problem independently, and credit the external researchers. It cuts both ways: if OpenAI really needs to access user data, even anonymised, to improve its models, they have to waive any pretention to solve "independently" any problem other people worked on with its tools. Otherwise they (OpenAI) have to firewall/cleanroom themselves.