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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

#151

Post by rocqua »

dguest wrote: post #110
cman1444 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (wh…

It seems very hard for OpenAI to prove that independence. Since they seem unable to exclude the possibility that their model was trained on transcripts by the two mathematicians.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#152

Post by rakejake »

dcre wrote: post #119
rakejake wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Worth noting they claim they did not choose the line of attack. Of course we don’t know whether that is true.

Plausible deniability - The line of attack is in their sessions/prompts data. Just make the prompt pointed enough that the search space is tractable and use your ginormous compute.

> "Of course we don’t know whether that is true"

Yep. Who is verifying these claims? We all know how trustworthy Altman & Co are.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#153

Post by plaidfuji »

simianwords wrote: post #150
plaidfuji wrote: post #125

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…

A company that can solve Millenium problems is somehow still can’t ever make profits. How did you come to that conclusion

1. They are massively unprofitable. It is a statement of fact. Nowhere did I say “can’t ever”.

2. Even their pursuit of this problem was itself unprofitable - $15M in compute to solve a problem with a $1M prize. Not that that was the point, but still.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#154

Post by ajjahs »

ltononro wrote: post #115
sensanaty wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take OpenAI at face value, they claim they threw a relatively simple prompt at the problem on a whim and boom presto, a swarm of "agents", 15 million dollars and 90 hours later they disproved the hypothesis. Wow, look at how powerful our AI is, you don't even need to be a world-class mathematician, you just tell it to solve a problem and it does! By contrast, what the world-class 2 mathematicians did was sat d…

>what the world-class 2 mathematicians did was sat down and started working on their proof for over a year If they were not related to anthropic I'd probably agree with you. OpenAI is much more for science than they are imo. Anthropic culture is all about "machine go brrrr" more than all of the other labs. If they had access to better models they'd probably would've one-shotted the solution. When the creator of bun w…

[dead]

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#155

Post by 219283751 »

impendia wrote: post #30
zero-sharp wrote: post #5

Moving forward, I can't imagine other mathematicians wanting to have this kind of experience. So there has to be a shift away from these services.

I'm a mathematician. I have a lot of trepidation about these tools and what they mean for the future of the profession. That said... most of us are not working on problems as famous as Navier-Stokes. Even if OpenAI could scoop me based on my back-and-forth with ChatGPT, which I presume they could if they threw $15 million worth of compute at it, I highly doubt they'd bother.

ChatGPT can also simple tell your ideas to another user.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#156

Post by sensanaty »

ltononro wrote: post #115
sensanaty wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take OpenAI at face value, they claim they threw a relatively simple prompt at the problem on a whim and boom presto, a swarm of "agents", 15 million dollars and 90 hours later they disproved the hypothesis. Wow, look at how powerful our AI is, you don't even need to be a world-class mathematician, you just tell it to solve a problem and it does! By contrast, what the world-class 2 mathematicians did was sat d…

>what the world-class 2 mathematicians did was sat down and started working on their proof for over a year If they were not related to anthropic I'd probably agree with you. OpenAI is much more for science than they are imo. Anthropic culture is all about "machine go brrrr" more than all of the other labs. If they had access to better models they'd probably would've one-shotted the solution. When the creator of bun w…

> If they were not related to anthropic I'd probably agree with you.

What does the company they work for (only 1 of them, mind you) have anything to do with the topic at hand? They were using both Anthropic & OAI models during their research, and they were doing it separate to their work as independent researchers rather than as employees of any specific company. In fact, this makes OAIs actions even worse because they tried a bribe in order to slice the Anthropic employee out of the deal.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#157

Post by famouswaffles »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #67
vbezhenar wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Anthr…

>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.

This is just lawyer speak. Maybe there was a small reward from a possible thumbs up on any of the chat sessions. Open AI have no way of knowing if that happened or not and the chances that, if this did happen, that it had anything to do with their solution of Navier Stokes is extremely unlikely.

>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.

There was never a threat to not publish their own work with whatever credit to whoever. This was about the offer to be a lead author on the paper that Open AI authored, an invitation that was not extended to Levant.

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#158

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

famouswaffles wrote: post #157
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…

>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. This is just lawyer speak. Maybe there was a small reward from a possible thumbs up on any of the chat sessions. Open AI have no way of knowing if that happened or not and the chances that, if this did happen, that…

OpenAI know the exact timelines involved, and what they train on, or do not.

You're right - it is exactly "lawyer speak", rather like Bill Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman".

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#159

Post by AlanYx »

greggoB wrote: post #28
olmo23 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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

>he specifically notes that they used the paid subscriptions, iirc.

Where are you seeing that? He only says "We used several LLMs throughout: Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s Codex, especially with GPT-5.6 Sol and, more recently, Astra. The latter was only used for writeups and auditing our arguments."

I might be missing something, but he doesn't seem to confirm that he opted out, at least in the written writeup, maybe he has on social media? He also likely had early access to Astra given the timing, and I thought early access customers couldn't opt out? (Am I wrong about that?)

Re: How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

#160

Post by famouswaffles »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #158
famouswaffles wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. This is just lawyer speak. Maybe there was a small reward from a possible thumbs up on any of the chat sessions. Open AI have no way of knowing if that happened or not and the chances that, if this did happen, that…

OpenAI know the exact timelines involved, and what they train on, or do not. You're right - it is exactly "lawyer speak", rather like Bill Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman".

Yes they know the timelines, which they've explained. No they don't know exactly what they train on. Even I don't, and my little experiments are nowhere near OpenAI scale. This is par the course for ML. Plus it would kind of defeat the purpose of de-anonimization if they could.
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