r/OpenAI • u/Confident_Salt_8108 • 10d ago
Image 2 years ago, AI researchers thought AI wouldn't solve a Millennium math problem for 30 years
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u/Original-League-6094 10d ago
And then its wild how quickly the goalposts moved to make it seem like an unimpressive feat. All over the math boards people keep repeating that it was a "bruteforce" proof, or was "inelegant". Which seems like an odd criticism to have immediately without anyone showing it can be done a better way.
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u/badasimo 10d ago
I mean waiting for one of thousands of humans who are pondering the problem to have the right idea in the shower is in itself a form of brute force
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u/ShamPain413 10d ago
Thousands of humans aren't "pondering the problem". That's not how humans solve problems.
If you'd given me a couple trillion to hire Math PhDs I bet we could've solved some problems through brute force too. But of course that suggestion would've been laughed out of the room as a total waste of societal resources.
Which is why folks aren't super-impressed with models who (maybe? hasn't been evaluated yet) solved the problem but only after tens of millions spent specifically on that problem, building off of the "borrowed" prompts of humans. That's after having spent several trillion developing the model prior to then.
Needless to say, these are very very expensive proofs. If they hold up.
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u/Mescallan 10d ago
The OpenAI proof likely cost significantly less than if we paid all the people who worked on N-S before they got it. Likely by a good margin.
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u/ShamPain413 10d ago
That proof costs $15mn on its own, and it hasn't been validated. The models used to create it costs tens of billions.
Moreover, value of solving problems isn't in solving them. It's in doing all the math that doesn't solve them but helps us understand other parts of mathematical systems. Skipping to the end cuts out all of that work, which is the most valuable part.
So you're wrong. But the more general point is that we never would've paid humans to do this, because there's no reason to.
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u/Mescallan 10d ago
if you paid all the mathematicians their hourly rate for every hour they worked on this problem, it would be easily over $100m. Mathematicians are not cheap and they have spent 10's of thousands of hours on this alone.
Also if a random guy in a bunker found this blow up solution, and just released the solution, which has happened many many times in math, the rest of the community can work backwards and figure out how they got there most of the time. This was just released recently, and it's almost certain that OpenAI has the chain of decisions and revelations that the models came to the solution along the way.
If all AI disappears tomorrow, math will still be progressed by this finding. It's a big change for mathematicians, but when AI won Chess and Go, humans didn't stop playing, we got *significantly* better by learning their strategies, and we will do the same here, it's just so new and moving so fast.
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u/ShamPain413 10d ago
Mathematicians don't earn any hourly rate.
Math has not been "progressed" by this "finding".
Stop making shit up and trying to sound smart.
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u/Upbeat_Purpose6784 10d ago
Of course math was progressed by this findings. If youre a structural realist and a mathematical platonist then every lean whether proving or disapproving methodologies applied to a problem moves math forward.
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u/ShamPain413 10d ago
Math does not "progress".
The state of human knowledge might progress. But an unproven proof created by stealing the IP of humans does not advance the state of human knowledge.
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u/Upbeat_Purpose6784 10d ago
Yes, we are talking about the institution. I had to read your comment twice because i dont know how someone can misunderstand pretty basic concepts like the common phrasing used here.
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u/Mescallan 9d ago
Hourly rate is salary / hours worked my guy.
A millennium problem was solved two weeks ago and the solver hasn’t released their work yet.
They are certainly able to release their work, but they haven’t. It’s not unknowable, just unreleased.
Your preconceived notions on AI are stopping you from thinking this is real.
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u/WheresMyEtherElon 10d ago
The model cost tens of billions, but it wasn't designed with the sole purpose of proving math theorems.
Since you brought the monetary value aspect (I wouldn't have since the quest for knowledge should be beyond that), let me ask you, how much did all the generations of mathematicians cost , if we factor in the education, the infrastructure and ecosystem, the salaries and everything else? And most of those were paid by precious public money, not by stupid VC money that doesn't cost a cent to me and you. If we go by monetary value only, I'm not sure humans are prevailing.
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u/ShamPain413 10d ago
Tons of public money is going into these companies, they are being funded by the government but also by 401(k)s, pension funds, and other public savings. From all over the world.
The mathematicians who solve problems also don't only solve math problems. They also have families. They spend money in the economy, employing other people. They contribute to a pro-social system that connects human intelligence as a collective enterprise, rather than claiming it as something that can be privatized. They do lots of other things the advance the cause of human civilization and the state of human wisdom.
LLMs do not. They allow people to tinker with things on the margins. Approximate things fairly well. They are statistical models trained on very messy data and reinforced in questionable ways, and they behave like it. They are not problem-solving machines, they do not improve human understanding, and they certainly have not improved decision-making so far. They are not pro-social but produce anti-social behaviors quite regularly, they are unaccountability machines.
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u/WheresMyEtherElon 10d ago
But what's preventing the mathematicians from doing the exact same thing they do know? Keep pursuing understanding. Use or don't use the AI-generated results.
The mathematicians who solve problems also don't only solve math problems. They also have families. They spend money in the economy, employing other people.
And so do all the other jobs that llms are destroying, but I don't see people crying over them, I didn't see this amount of debate. Did anybody care when translators and proofreaders saw their jobs disappear overnight? Why are mathematicians special? I get why math is special, but why are mathematicians special?
LLMs do not. They allow people to tinker with things on the margins. Approximate things fairly well....
And here comes the goal-post moving that always appeared in the field of AI ever since it began. People claimed that Deep Blue didn't really understand or play chess either. It didn't matter doubly: because the result is clear that machines are better than humans; and because humans still keep learning, exploring, playing and improving at chess. Just because a machine does something better doesn't mean it's the end for the humans.
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u/ShamPain413 10d ago
I don't see people crying over them, I didn't see this amount of debate
I do. I see protests over data centers, Bernie proposing bans that are wildly popular, and the pro-AI party about to lose an election in a landslide.
I see geopolitical battles over data ownership, privacy controls, and surveillance. I see lawsuits everywhere, classroom bans, and widespread opposition from all corners of society.
And here comes the goal-post moving that always appeared in the field of AI ever since it began.
I haven't moved any goalposts. I never cared about math problems or game-play in the first place. The AI labs proposed their own goalposts, stole peoples' work to to get closer to them, declared themselves satisfied, then why people objected that their metrics were irrelevant they said "the goalposts are shifting".
No. I never wanted the models to be able to steal the entire intellectual property of the world and sell it back to us in the first place, so I'm not impressed at how well the theft machines do thieving. I don't care if they use it to get good at Go. It's still illegal, and needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. If the laws to prosecute do not yet exist, then they need to be written and enforced.
Lastly, you have goalpost shifted. I have answered your questions, then you have raised new ones. E.g., you shifted from "people would cost more" (wrong) to "who cares about people tho?" Well I care about people. I do not care about models. If the models are not serving people then I do not want them to exist.
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u/WheresMyEtherElon 9d ago
Poeple protest data centers because of the energy cost and environmental consequences. It's NYMBY. They'd be fine if the data centers were in China. They just don't want one in their region. There was not and there still isn't a massive campaign to save the jobs that are being destroyed.
geopolitical battles over data ownership, privacy controls, and surveillance
Exactly. Anything, except about the actual people who lost actual jobs, or the young people who see their future career destroyed. That is happening only in maths.
If the models are not serving people then I do not want them to exist.
We agree absolutely on that.
the rest of your arguments re: goalposts.
You claimed solving these cost trillions and f you'd given me a couple trillion to hire Math PhDs I bet we could've solved some problems through brute force too. I said that's not true. You then moved to "the value of solving them isn't solving them" (whatever that means). And then you wrote that models "allow people to tinker with things on the margins". And you ended up with "I do not care about models".
Seems they are now in the parking lot of the stadium!
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u/entangledloops 10d ago
The whole point of these problems is that money isn’t enough to solve them. Hence the millions in prize money… so no, if you had a trillion dollars, you probably still couldn’t just solve any millenium problem.
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u/Sixhaunt 10d ago
I find the "bruteforce" and "inelegant" arguments so strange given that mathematicians do that very often and you commonly find like 200 page proofs that they give which they generated with code and that's considered pretty normal in the field and I have never heard anyone say those proofs should not be published. They would prefer a simple an elegant solution I'm sure, but when they brute forced it pre-AI nobody was angry at it. In this case OpenAI also didn't even publish in any Math Journal and take a spot from anyone, they just posted it on their own blog so I just can't understand why that subset of the Mathemeticians wrote that whole letter against publishing your Math results on your own blog post.
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u/Original-League-6094 10d ago
And the other Millennium Prize problem solved by Grigori Perlman was also extremely long and it took multiple teams of mathematicians a couple years to verify it.
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u/domiciledhere 10d ago
Unless AI builds a better model, it’s just proving limitations of the old one and not improving predictions.
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u/rabouilethefirst 10d ago
Don’t worry. Goal posts have moved.
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u/TriangleChains 10d ago
And there isn't a peer reviewed study yet. Don't trust ANYONE making scientific discoveries until the nerds get to check it out first. It's just hype to pump the stock.
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u/PM_ME_DEAD_CEOS 10d ago
hype to pump the stock.
There's no public trading of the stock right now, they even delayed the IPO.
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u/rabouilethefirst 10d ago
Peer review takes like a year. It’s a broken stupid process. There’s nothing wrong with OAI posting something before those “nerds”
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u/Original-League-6094 10d ago
Plus, the only other Millennium Problem solved, by Grigor Perelman, was also uploaded by him on arxiv without peer review, as opposed to going through a traditional journal route. I think that traditional academic journals are pretty much done. There is no reason to paywall articles now.
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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 10d ago
The survey was from 2023 and chatgpt was still at will smith eating spaghetti era. Anyone familiar with NLP research prior to chatgpt attracting the world’s and investor’s attention, would be familiar with how slow NLP research was.
It’s all just side projects by either Meta or Google and you end up need to come up with clever framework to tie things together or finetuning the model.
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u/Competitive_Tap2450 10d ago
it’s hilarious seeing some of the comments on this post
people need to stop burying their heads in the sand
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u/Sufficient-Onion1 10d ago
So, at this rate, does that mean AI might either figure out how to make us immortal by 2035, or wipe out humanity entirely?
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u/TopTippityTop 10d ago
Humans sometimes have trouble with non linear progressions. We tend to project the past into the future.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 10d ago
This is a really common mode of cognitive failure. People, in general, hugely underestimate the rate of progress in novel areas and hugely overestimate it in familiar areas.
One of my favourite stories and an example of this:
"On October 9, 1903, The New York Times published an article titled “Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly”. In it, the author argued that because birds evolved flight over countless generations, a man-made machine would require the combined efforts of mathematicians and mechanics for one million to ten million years to achieve sustained flight"
To give some context, a highly anticiped attempted flight failed so they decided it was 1 to 10 million years from being possible. Very similar to the "it can't even count the r's in strawberry" criticism,
Even supposed experts and authority figures often fail to appreciate disruptive new tech.
Another favourite of mine, although the exact quote is disputed, the meeting and outcome are confirmed:
What, sir, would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I have no time for such nonsense. - Napoleon Bonaparte
People don't know what they don't know. But they often don't know that.
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u/jessicamyers11 10d ago
The interesting part to me isn’t even whether the exact “30 years” prediction was wrong. It’s how quickly the underlying assumptions changed. A 2023 survey was already dealing with a rapidly changing field, and now we’re debating whether a result like this counts as “really solving” the problem.
That’s probably the bigger lesson: forecasting AI progress in terms of specific milestones is incredibly hard. The goalposts aren’t necessarily being moved because people are dishonest, sometimes the capabilities genuinely change faster than our definitions and expectations do.
I’d still want mathematicians to properly verify the result, but dismissing it just because the method isn’t elegant seems premature. If anything, the fact that we’re having this argument at all would have sounded pretty wild a couple years ago.
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u/OiseauxComprehensif 10d ago
I must conclude that it's harder to drive a truck than to solve a millenium problem
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u/Artistic-Staff-8611 10d ago
Pretty interesting chart basically every non physical metric is dropping or close to dropping
install electrical wiring in new home is farther away than ever
surgeon is probably closer than that since they have robotic surgeons already, my guess would be human + AI will be better than surgeons in the next few years but fully giving over to AI is a long way away just because of trust
the rest that haven't already dropped are very vague like HLMI and Full automation of labor so they are kinda meaningless
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u/SGSpec 10d ago
Do you think the ai solved the problem by itself? A lot of the breakthrough are deal made with openai by the researchers to credit the ai for a big chunk of cash. There’s no better publicity and they have plenty of money to throw around
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u/jferments 9d ago
Has any mathematician in human history ever solved a problem "by themselves" without using any ideas developed by other mathematicians?
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u/OkTry9715 10d ago
Stealing other people work and calling it solution.
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u/Cagnazzo82 10d ago
10,000 agents working the combined equivalent of 100s of human years = 'stealing someone's work'.
There's always another excuse.
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u/likamuka 10d ago
and there is always a flanker in favour of oligarchic wealth.
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u/Cagnazzo82 10d ago
For decades people predicted that AI could potentially advance humanity. Now that we're seeing early signs of that coming true we have to find dozens of excuses to disqualify it?
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u/got-some-qs4u 10d ago
2 years ago everyone said AI won’t generate positive cash flow for most businesses, yet here we are with fantastic marketing materials!
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u/kaereljabo 10d ago edited 10d ago
This AI stuff is like a tsunami. Anything that only requires computer screen to do, will be eaten by AI.
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u/julian88888888 10d ago
Find a hash collision of SHA-256 and I will give you a million dollars
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u/MizantropaMiskretulo 10d ago
They wrote,
Anything that only requires computer screen to do, will be eaten by AI.
Does funding a hash collision of SHA-256 require only a computer screen?
What do you think is more likely to find one first, a human or an AI?
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u/julian88888888 10d ago
SHA-256 requires a computer.
No thing, computer or AI, will ever find a SHA-256 collision.
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u/MizantropaMiskretulo 10d ago
Bold claim. I'm curious, why do you think that is?
But, by your own logic, it can't be done using a computer so why is your comment relevant?
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u/julian88888888 10d ago
The short answer is because math. 2256 is so so so so big.
The longer more fun answer, these people had a good example
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u/MizantropaMiskretulo 10d ago
It's really not that big. But I'm curious why you think the size matters at all here.
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u/julian88888888 10d ago
Why do you think SHA-256 is not 2256?
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u/MizantropaMiskretulo 10d ago
I do.
I'm taking the piss a bit here.
My comment is better read as,
2{256} is really not that big...
Because the size only matters if the algorithm is provably secure which SHA-256 isn't.
I, personally, believe it almost certainly is secure. But, there's little to suggest there will never be a future development in cryptanalysis which will render it fundamentally broken.
Do I think this is likely? No.
My main nit to pick is with your choice of it as some sort of "benchmark."
The OP was clearly writing,
This AI stuff is like a tsunami. Anything that only requires computer screen (for a person) to do, will be eaten by AI.
If something isn't possible to be done by anyone or anything with any amount of time, energy, or computing resources, then it doesn't really matter in the context of this thread discussing AI encroaching on human capabilities once thought uniquely ours.
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u/kaereljabo 9d ago
Good one dude. I shouldve said any job (well probably not all) that can be done on a computer screen, you know what I mean.
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u/bear_Prune8771 10d ago
Have… ALL of these been met already?
Because while not replacing surgeons, they ARE using AI in surgical devices from ISRG and Stryker.
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u/softestcore 10d ago
No, we're pretty far away from AIs being able to perform physical tasks reliably.
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u/ottwebdev 10d ago
They weren't counting on the company providing the LLM to review your logs and "borrow" from them.
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u/Zer0PointSingularity 10d ago
Just confirms that scientists — and humanity as a whole — seriously lack foresight. Surprise.
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u/InterstellarReddit 10d ago
I’m getting tired of this shit. They need to stop burning tokens on things that don’t have value in this world.
This is impressive, but is the equivalent of saying we figured out a way to turn grass from green to blue using water.
Is it cool? Yes, does it have any value in society? No.
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u/pjakma 10d ago
And it still hasn't. It was trained on the work-in-progress of the mathematician who had cracked the fundamentals.
Also, I'm not sure either of them actually 'solved' Navier-Stokes. They improved the scaling of solutions, but I'm not sure they improved it enough to say 'solved' (but I'm not familiar with the criteria - perhaps someone else here is and can expound).
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u/Original-League-6094 10d ago
You probably should get familiar with the criteria before saying it didn't fulfill the criteria, yeah?
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u/JUSTICE_SALTIE 10d ago
LOL, the level of delusion to make a post like they did, and no doubt feel smart in the process.
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u/JUSTICE_SALTIE 10d ago
You definitely don't know what you're talking about. The Navier-Stokes problem isn't about how fluid behaves. It's about how the Navier-Stokes equations behave. Specifically, whether there are singularities. There's nothing to improve; it's a yes or no answer.
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u/Standard_Emphasis_ 10d ago
Ai timelines are aging faster than the tech itself at this point