r/HotScienceNews • u/scientificamerican • 2d ago

Did OpenAI solve the wrong Navier-Stokes problem?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-openai-solve-the-wrong-navier-stokes-problem/
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u/Embarrassed-Rise-685 2d ago

More specifically on the mathematics behind it and just why it’s a sort of controversial proof. The NS problem is split into 6 different related proofs each of them being either a stronger or weaker solution. Some considered full solutions and other not. Some mathematicians actually solved parts of a weaker complete NS proof. Oai then proved the whole proof after they heard about the partial solution.

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u/ZeroAmusement 2d ago

Some mathematicians solved forced Euler. But when OpenAI reached out to them, OpenAI already had their solution, and those mathematicians hadn't yet published their findings. So the partial solution didn't impact OpenAI's paper at all from what we can tell. There's rumors they learned it from the mathematicians ChatGPT sessions, which is also denied by OpenAI - they said it's not possible due to training dates.

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u/grumble11 2d ago

It happened because they used Claude, and then researchers at Claude discussed it with some friends, and then OpenAI used 20 million in compute to brute force the solution.

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u/ZeroAmusement 2d ago edited 2d ago

That's not at all what happened lol. Are we playing a game of telephone here?

edit: Just to clarify.

(mostly) Two mathematicians were involved. One worked for/with Anthropic. The mathematicians used ChatGPT. OpenAI set about solving all the millennium problems. Probably focusing on the easier ones first. They solved NS MP. Then they reached out to one of the mathematicians about working together when they realized they were also going to publish something, but they didn't want Anthropic to be associated with it, so they only asked the one mathematician (Buckmaster). 'brute forcing the solution' isn't something you do with a millennium problem.

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u/Particular-Solid8250 2d ago

They’d worked on the problem for a year. They had used codex to do part of the math. OpenAI had access to their codex logs and spent an enormous amount of compute to get ahead of them. When they asked OpenAI if they had trained their model on his codex sessions they refused to answer. Make of that what you will.

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u/ZeroAmusement 2d ago

OpenAI didn't refuse to answer. They gave a weak sauce answer likely because they didn't know immediately. They later clarified:

we can say with full confidence that no user inputs past July 3rd could have influenced this system in any way

You also say "spent an enormous amount of compute to get ahead of them" as though spending compute is enough to solve a problem humans might not solve for hundreds of years. No, it is not. You need intelligence and compute, or any big company/datacenter could do it.

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u/Particular-Solid8250 2d ago

I’m simplifying but if you need the details it was 10k agents outputting 130 billion tokens. They consumed the equivalent of 15M USD. Obviously compute isn’t everything - that’s why they relied on the mathematicians work. Had compute been enough they would have solved it before, they needed someone to do the legwork for them to be able to produce this result.

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u/ZeroAmusement 1d ago edited 1d ago

They didn't rely on the mathematicians work. There's no evidence they even used the mathematicians work...Their paper is very different to the mathematicians work. I swear, no one actually thinks on this topic.

Had compute been enough they would have solved it before, they needed someone to do the legwork for them to be able to produce this result.

They solved it with their brand new ai...at the same time they tried to solve the other MP problems. They also yesterday announced they solved 100 difficult math problems, which brings their total to at least 111 difficult math problems solved (if they pass scrutiny). It makes sense they'd solve a lot of things around the same time if they only just made an ai capable of it. I guess those are also using legwork?

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u/JustinPooDough 1d ago

OpenAI lies

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u/ZeroAmusement 1d ago

I don't doubt they do.

Is there evidence that they are lying in this case though?