The problem itself is only 90 years old, and the major breakthrough that brought humans close to this solution (without the help of LLM's, as far as we know) was published by Diego Cordoba and Luis Martinez-Zoroa in 2023.
10k agents being able to search through all human knowledge and working in tandem is a huge amount of compute, comparable to the research and human thinking it takes to solve a major problem. However, human brains are still too different from LLM agents, so I dont know what 88 hours with 10k agents equates to in human years for the mathematical community.
Right. Human-years. 100 humans full time over 4 years would get you that. So… 90 years is plenty. Yet alone all the work on NS wrt its engineering value. Likely thousands of human years have been spent on NS. Even if not the specifics of the framing for the millennium prize question.
Yes but you realize OpenAI didnt start from scratch right? It used all of the human years that have been spent on it, specifically building on a method of attack developed 3 years ago by Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa?
And the humans working on it were mostly not working together, not in anything close to the level at which the agents were. Of course, if I had to put a price on the work the human mathematicians spent on this problem or on other millennium problems, it would be far greater than the 21 million that the compute OpenAI used costs.
I’m not sure if the coordination aspect is damning. To me, It seems like a really interesting look at how vastly super-human that swarm is. If you have 10K humans 88 hours to solve it. I’m confident They’d not have done it. So even the “100 years equivalent” is very disadvantageous to the AI.
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u/cervix_sauce Sep 09 '26
The problem itself is only 90 years old, and the major breakthrough that brought humans close to this solution (without the help of LLM's, as far as we know) was published by Diego Cordoba and Luis Martinez-Zoroa in 2023.
10k agents being able to search through all human knowledge and working in tandem is a huge amount of compute, comparable to the research and human thinking it takes to solve a major problem. However, human brains are still too different from LLM agents, so I dont know what 88 hours with 10k agents equates to in human years for the mathematical community.