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Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

cims.nyu.edu

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Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#341

Post by [deleted] »

robinhouston wrote: post #127
qnleigh wrote: post #17

> It was also said that if OpenAI posted after us, they would say that we deserved the Clay Prize, and that we were the “closest humans to the problem”. I declined both offers. I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. T…

For context and balance, Bubeck has tweeted a curiously non-specific denial: > A series of false and inflammatory allegations against me are currently circulating on social channels. To clarify, I came into the discussion following academic norms, and I'm disappointed that it has come to this. Anyone who knows me knows that academic standards are of the highest importance to me. Will have more to say tomorrow.

[deleted]

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#342

Post by simonw »

ryan_n wrote: post #325
simonw wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you feel about the integrity of the machine learning researchers over the past twenty years who trained models on scraped internet data that weren't particularly powerful and didn't attract any attention?

If they scraped internet data in the same way as current day frontier labs do, then I feel the same exact way about them. Why would I feel any different if that is the case?

My point is that researchers and academics really have been doing this for decades - it's the reason projects like Common Crawl and LAION exist.

I think it's notable that nobody was calling out those researchers for their lack of integrity, because the systems they were building did not seem like a threat to anyone.

OpenAI etc get accused of a lack of integrity on this precisely because the systems they are building work, and are profitable.

My personal opinion here is that integrity is more about what you build with the data. I think saying "scraping means you lack integrity" is a simplification.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#343

Post by esafak »

vatsachak wrote: post #308
wwind123 wrote: post #97

Hard mathematics problems used to take years if not decades to tackle manually. But now with enough compute and a hint that a certain approach might work, it just takes a few days. This could be the last year that humans could still make more substantial contribution to major match problems than machines.

And everyone should be glad for that!

What line of work are you in? Presumably not mathematics.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#344

Post by porridgeraisin »

treyjshaffer wrote: post #331
porridgeraisin wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The for-case for this type of method is that this is economies of scale for mathematics. We are basically mass manufacturing math. Just like you have just 100 designers for a product selling millions of units, you will now need 100 mathematicians to make millions of advancement. Yes you have factory workers, but if we are being realistic they have negative leverage in the world and the analogue of that is not somethi…

This isn't a useful analogy. His point is that the millenium problems should be treated as interesting goals where the journey is the purpose and where the end doesn't matter so much. We don't care about having an incomprehensible solution to the NS so much as having an elegant solution after many of subfields of math are built up in order to obtain that elegant solution.

I agree on that, my post was not meant to be opposing this.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#346

Post by vatsachak »

qlte wrote: post #340
vatsachak wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Winning a millennium prize is not worth the fallout of "we will steal your IP"

They train on chat logs unless opted out. This really isn't a conspiratorial claim requiring humans to decide to steal IP if true. His prior work predating OpenAI's interest in the problem was ingested over the last year as he made progress and used for training. Then, with a prompting nudge from OpenAI's team who acknowledged hearing about the direction "Anthropic" (his co-collaborator) had been pursuing, they're ab…

That's fair, but the proofs are different and there was no active perusing of Tristan's approach.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#348

Post by vatsachak »

esafak wrote: post #343
vatsachak wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And everyone should be glad for that!

What line of work are you in? Presumably not mathematics.

I have a math PhD and publications in top journals, I left math for programming because I hated academic politics

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#349

Post by MaKey »

OpenAI's statement:

  We congratulate Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster on their remarkable mathematical work.
  
  We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem. 
  
  While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models. 
  
  However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs. unforced).
https://xcancel.com/OpenAI/status/2097375276384567642

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#350

Post by qlte »

Drblessing wrote: post #271
bhouston wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ignoring the drama But the drama here is a little important. Stealing the millennium prize for N-S is sort of a big deal, especially to those who had been working on it for the last few years.

The math is all that matters.

A hundred pages of impenetrable brute forced Lean would advance the field much less than something elegant and human understandable, perhaps relying on some new clever spark of innovation that might inspire new areas of research.

Particularly if the first proof being "solved" thanks to piles of money and compute for self-serving marketing discourages the mathematician who might have otherwise devoted years of focus to reach the superior proof we will now never see.

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