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More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

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Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#11

Post by jeltz »

ramblerman wrote: post #8
Grimblewald wrote: post #6

people seem to miss tge point of this. The problem isn't about credit, its about portraying these models as more competant than they really are. It fuels idiotic statements like jensen huangs recent "agi achieved" statement, which fuels an already dangerous financial fire.

As per the post, this mathematician has been working on this problem for 20 years. So either he was "just" about to breakthrough and this is a big coincidence, or Astra was able to push through the remaining block of 5-10-20-never years it might have taken. That's still a pretty big marker of competence in my eyes. The point of controversy seems to be who gets credit

To me that is not a credit thing because this removes a piece evidence for the ability of AI to come up with novel ideas while still making it a useful tool.

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#12

Post by mentalgear »

ramblerman wrote: post #8
Grimblewald wrote: post #6

people seem to miss tge point of this. The problem isn't about credit, its about portraying these models as more competant than they really are. It fuels idiotic statements like jensen huangs recent "agi achieved" statement, which fuels an already dangerous financial fire.

As per the post, this mathematician has been working on this problem for 20 years. So either he was "just" about to breakthrough and this is a big coincidence, or Astra was able to push through the remaining block of 5-10-20-never years it might have taken. That's still a pretty big marker of competence in my eyes. The point of controversy seems to be who gets credit

The big LLM providers, desperate for good PR before their IPOs, are all actively looking for 'almost finished' hard problems, e.g. where the conceptual / creative parts are almost done and they only need to throw their VC-backed resources at to brute-force through the remaining computationally expensive problem (lean, etc) and claim 'they have solved it'.

It's an utterly disrespectful, exploitive process, but all in line with exploitative predator capitalism of the stock market and big companies, now exploiting the knowledge / academia domain for scraps with a thin veneer of 'for science' PR.

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#13

Post by Cloudef »

Relying on cloud services is a big liability. I'd think twice before feeding data to these LLM cloud products. If you make them a fundamental part of your product / development / workflow, be ready for the eventual moment the pricing and terms change.

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#14

Post by ethanwillis »

mdspan wrote: post #10
viccis wrote: post #9

Some mathematicians I know who've been following this have realized that they'd all gotten some emails from people they now know to be affiliated with OpenAI/Anthropic asking questions about their research in a way that seemed like scooping attempts. Also, a lot of my mathematicians buddies have reported students basically asking if it's worth ever doing grad school for pure math, and even very motivated students are…

Curious, what other options are prospective pure math grad students considering?

I think Anthropic told them being a plumber is a great option.

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#15

Post by r0ze-at-hn »

Doing some research and at this point doing it very much in the open with dates on GitHub so if any AI Lab says they re-discover my exact work it will be obvious that the AI used or was trained on my work. I am guessing anyone in a similar situation is now thinking about how they date their existing work if the math is done, but the proses are not.

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#17

Post by itake »

Legend2440 wrote: post #2

This is a really weak claim. The evidence they offer is just "someone somewhere says they had a discussion with AI about the topic at some point". They don't even claim to have had a proof, only to have been working on it.

The AI only seem to solve the problems that it had human trading data on…

If this wasn’t human driven, I’d expect to see other problems within that problem. Space solved not just the ones that it had chat data on.

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#18

Post by mlazos »

It’s crazy to me that companies/researchers share important data with these AI labs, you’re basically giving them your secret sauce which they then share with all of your competitors via training on conversations. At the same time I don’t really know alternatives other than a slightly less than frontier local LLM. Not sure how good they are at math.

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#19

Post by matherial »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #3

If we put aside the idea of credit for a moment, it sounds like human/AI collaboration is indeed super charging discovery.

"Discovery" is not a goal in itself. I could launch a project to find out how many people in the United States have names such that if you assign numbers to every character and then sum the values, the sum works out to 72. It's discovery, but it's useless unless it has some higher goal.

The labs are attacking these problems as a demonstration of capabilities, spending more money on the demos than any mathematician will ever see in their entire life. They don't care if the findings have any other value to anyone. Mathematicians have very different objectives for their work.

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