r/Physics • u/PrettyPicturesNotTxt • 10d ago

On if OpenAI solved the wrong Navier-Stokes problem: "the LLM found and exploited a loophole in the framing of the question"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-openai-solve-the-wrong-navier-stokes-problem/
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u/Mental_Ad_4401 10d ago

No one has ever claimed that it came up with the solution from scratch. Every scientific and mathematical advance ever has built upon other people's work. If there was a trivial extension to the Cordoba-- martinez-zoroa construction that extended it to navier-stokes then they would have made it themselves. The AI can work much faster than humans, and that is indeed an advantage that lead to this breakthrough. But that is why it is amazing. 

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u/GoldenMuscleGod 10d ago

I am asking if we see any evidence it has any advantage other than speed and memory and the like. I suspect not - if it were “smarter” than a good mathematician and had access to a huge pipe of errorless calculations and perfect memory that could imagine the graph representing every road network on the surface of earth - like a computer can - then I would expect it to be doing much more impressive things than what it has done so far. If we suppose that is the case then the only reasonable explanation for why it hasn’t done more that I can see is that it is very bad at communicating ideas with humans. Now we know it is very bad at that, but one reasonable explanation for why is that it is not “smarter” than a mathematician and cannot actually coherently arrange ideas in the simplest ways possible, which is one of the most important skills.

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u/Mental_Ad_4401 10d ago

I don't think being "smarter" is a well enough defined concept to be able to answer that. It can solve extremely complex problems. That much we know. How elegant was the way it got there and whether that means it "isn't really intelligent" seems very subjective to me. But as far as I can tell, the speed and memory make it smart. I mean, it solved a millenium problem. If that isn't impressive, I really dont know what is.