191–200 of 292 posts
Are there still any reasonable arguments to be mad at OpenAI at this point? Looking at how everything unfolded, this seems to have hit them way harder then they deserved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that the math community (incl. those 25 Fields medalists) has come out strongly against this trophy hunting of their unsolved problems, to the detriment of mathematics, I don't think these companies are going to be getting positive press if they ignore this plea and continue with this, nor is this going to help turn public sentiment pro-AI. Presumably the people that OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to impress w…
They aren't going to sit on millenium solutions regardless (so if Hodge and /or BSD is really done it will get announced especially because of the baseless accusations), and they aren't going to stop trying to solve P/NP and Riemann. The letter doesn't really matter. It's not the first time, and I don't think AI's dramatic ramp in capabilities ever had positive reception from the bulk of mathematicians anyway.
Imagine if they had handled this differently and these results - still using OpenAI models - were coming from the math community. How much better the PR would have been - AI helping math/science rather than yet another story of AI harming society in some way.
No doubt this is what they were at least partially aiming for - not just shooting a trophy animal to brag about, but also being seen to advance math/science, a la AlphaFold, not just take all our jobs and enshittify society with deep fakes and AI slop. But, they heavily misjudged.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The result was never the point. Clearly the real-world cannot "blow-up" - real-world water vortices do not reach infinite velocity, etc. The point of having Navier-Stokes as a Millennium prize was to hopefully generate new mathematics and techniques along the way, and auto-generating a sprawling AI-slop proof or millions of lines of Lean does not accomplish that result. Clearly OpenAI has no interest in the math itse…
Right, the real world doesn’t blow up. So if N-S does then it means in some situations it doesn’t model the real world well. That’s important because if we can understand those situations we can avoid erroneously relying on it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For giving away a million bucks, you get to gatekeep however you choose. But no, peer reviewed and published in a reputable journal is a fairly normal standard.
The whole "reputable" marker is where it gets into "True Scotsman" territory and the whole "publishing papers" thing gets called out as a racket even on HN now and then with many videos against it by former "academia" people on YouTube. The sooner AI brings down such archaic customs into a gibbering pile of protesting rubble, the better innit?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For giving away a million bucks, you get to gatekeep however you choose. But no, peer reviewed and published in a reputable journal is a fairly normal standard.
Being normal doesn't necessarily mean it isn't gatekeeping- gatekeeping is also quite "normal" in many cases. That being said, I think there needs to be some standard, and peer review seems like the best we have come up with. But is the current status quo for scientific publication the best we can do? I think that is an open question and we should be able to openly discuss alternatives.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No it isn't. Best and worst and ill-defined anyway but the chess ELO score of various LLMs has fluctuated up and down, it's not been montonically increasing. What is the best answer to "how do I make cocaine"? The models are getting larger, with more compute and RAM backing them, but that doesn't automatically make them better if you don't define how you're measuring better-ness.
None of the frontier labs care about Chess as it's already a solved problem. If they did, the models would be much better. It's really not that hard. Google has a paper on grandmaster level chess without search from transformers. Better obviously means better, like how they became better than they were 6 months and a year ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren't going to sit on millenium solutions regardless (so if Hodge and /or BSD is really done it will get announced especially because of the baseless accusations), and they aren't going to stop trying to solve P/NP and Riemann. The letter doesn't really matter. It's not the first time, and I don't think AI's dramatic ramp in capabilities ever had positive reception from the bulk of mathematicians anyway.
Yeah, I don't expect them to stop, but I do think they are probably hurting themselves, as well as mathematics, by continuing do to this. Imagine if they had handled this differently and these results - still using OpenAI models - were coming from the math community. How much better the PR would have been - AI helping math/science rather than yet another story of AI harming society in some way. No doubt this is what…
Unlike AlphaFold, this technology has the potential to wholesale replace the entire profession. You're never going to get anything more than bad PR from that group as the threat looms.
Over 3 Billion images gets generated per week via OpenAI chatgpt image models. None of the poor PR from artists on AI generated images even remotely matters.
Proving things without comprehending them is a threat to intellectual work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For giving away a million bucks, you get to gatekeep however you choose. But no, peer reviewed and published in a reputable journal is a fairly normal standard.
And just to spell it out, since it looks like HackerNews is flooded by people who are new to science these days: even if a result doesn't come with a price, scholarly peer review is the norm across all of science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarly_peer_review
The two-year publication rule is the interesting part. OpenAI doesn't need the million, and the community will judge the result regardless of whether Clay ever accepts it.