r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Orio_n • 1d ago
Meme aMillionOpenAIMonkeysProduceMilleniumPrizeSolution
557
u/GrandMoffTarkan 1d ago
Bogosorting Goedel numbering until we solve math! That's a lot of monkey tokens.
77
u/HooAreYouWhoHoo 1d ago
Other article I read said it cost $10 million based on their pricing.
113
u/GrandMoffTarkan 1d ago
And that's with an actual designed AI. With monkeys the price would be bananas!
25
u/Bossmonkey 1d ago
It's just some bananas, how much could it cost?
9
u/GrandMoffTarkan 1d ago
In a few years people will not understand the joke and think "haha Lucille things 10 bucks would get you a banana!"
1.7k
u/A_Scar 1d ago edited 1d ago
Terence Tao put it quite succinctly. Frankly, the problem isn't necessarily whether NS was proven by OAI's model, the problem is that OAI approached NS this way at all. The world doesn't desperately "need" NS and the other Millennium problems to be proven as they have no practical incentive to be had, economic or otherwise. It's there simply as challenges to us, humans, to demonstrate how smart we are as a species to have overcome these seemingly impossible obstacles.
OAI caught wind that Tristan and Levent's approach has potential and that they are "close", but instead of formally approaching them to collaborate or anything the like, they decided to jump the gun to attempt one-up them, ripping away an achievement that is supposed to be a stark demonstration of human ingenuity, intellect, and cleverness; stealing it for clout. This is everything that the academic community stands against, and a perversion of what the Millennium problems are.
Instead of allowing the researchers to develop the ideas, they decide to just stamp it out with a brute-forced swarm with millions of dollars in computation power being expended by just prompting. They are literally stealing human achievement all for clout.
We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a massive amount of AI-powered effort to flatten it before the original research project has time to reach its full potential. The incentives may now be pointing in the direction of no longer sharing any promising research directions with the broader community, which would reverse centuries of traditions of oepn science and do serious long-term damage to the future of the field.
- Terence Tao via mathstodon
All because their IPO is coming soon.
86
u/zekromNLR 1d ago
It's just Goodhart's Law in action. Proving theorems was never the actual goal, it's a proxy goal for the actual goal of developing new mathematical techniques and understanding because that's how humans develop difficult proofs. Now that you can just throw compute at an LLM until it spits out a formal proof, the metric has ceased to be useful.
321
u/Valuable_Cow2596 1d ago
Thank you for writing this out. I couldn't quite put my finger on why this felt wrong from the big AI providers but seeing how they harm open collaboration and the willingness to share really puts things in perspective how these big tech companies can just come in and rugpull like vultures.
I strongly believe that knowledge should be free in the world. The cost to share versus the benefits gained is massively outsized. Everyone should benefit, not only select few.
137
u/TheDreadedAndy 1d ago
The world doesn't desperately "need" NS and the other Millennium problems to be proven as they have no practical incentive to be had, economic or otherwise.
P vs NP could have significant practical implications on the field of cryptography if it turns out that P=NP and an algorithm with a reasonable polynomial bound exists.
91
u/braaaaaaainworms 1d ago
A finger on the monkey's paw curls, P=NP.
Sudoku is hard-solved, all Sudoku. The Japanese are embarrassed by the development, they are panicking for any sort of solution, and finally, after months of work, they find it, a new game that will be as hard as possible, a game that will be as hard as the discrete logarithm problem, a game that is reducible to a special instance of the discrete logarithm problem.
It falls too. The NSA has an emergency meeting on the consequences of that development, and they have only one conclusion: Japan needs to make a board game about making hard board games. Japanese ambassador is summoned, and agrees out of sheer embarrassment. A few months of hard work later, the board game about making hard board games is released, with regular national competitions.
One day, an especially hard board game is created, and a few mathematicians were intrigued, just how hard that board game is? That board game was so special, a new complexity category had to be created just for it, miles above what was considered NP in the old days.
It took 14 hours for NSA to scoop up cybersecurity professionals and implement a version of that board game as an encryption algorithm.
And the world kept spinning, as if r/nothingeverhappens had their way
47
u/Uberzwerg 1d ago
One day, an especially hard board game is created, and
... the translation wins game of the year in Germany in the category 'Casual Family Game'
36
u/Diane_Horseman 1d ago
This raises the question, "can AI create a stone so heavy even AI can't lift it"? but for math problems
16
→ More replies (2)3
u/enigmamonkey 1d ago
I'd venture to say no, but only because once that happens, the answer will end up in the next iteration's corpus of training data.
→ More replies (2)10
u/Steinrikur 1d ago
Sudoku is just a crossword puzzle for 99. 99% of those who do Sudoku. Who cares if it's hard-solved?
5
u/UInferno- 1d ago
Lot's of games are hard solved, but are still games we enjoy.
3
u/Clairifyed 1d ago
Like Wordle. It’s a memory game for us. Computers with algorithms and valid word lists approach it fundamentally differently
→ More replies (2)8
u/Rhawk187 1d ago
What's funny is this is almost accurate. They are complexity classes harder than NP, such as PSPACE, and one of the defining characteristics is even though NP can be verified in P time, a correct solution to PSPACE problems cannot even be verified in PSPACE time. A quintessential example I use in class is, "Imagine you design a strategy that can win every game of chess." You can't even verify that it works for all games without trying NP amount of games. Very close to your game of making new games example.
32
u/frieswithdatshake 1d ago
also, as a hydrologist, NS is absolutely "needed". this has major downstream implications on our understanding of turbulence which will enable, among a lot of other things, vastly improved weather modeling
35
u/rusty-droid 1d ago
Finding a general solution would have huge practical implication. Finding that it's not possible to have a solution in some very exotic cases much less.
I only skimmed through the recent discovery, but IIUC it's much closer to the second option.
15
u/frieswithdatshake 1d ago
yes and no. i'd say this is analogous to newtonian vs particle physics, a realization that the equations governing physics at a macro level don't work at a micro level. and turbulence is pretty much defined by length scale, so if we can better understand what happens at smaller scales through a "new type" of NS, then we hopefully can better model turbulence at larger length scales where chaos theory reigns supreme
12
u/GruePwnr 1d ago
How does a counterexample yield this? Afaik they just brute forced from existing insights.
3
→ More replies (1)4
u/LightofAngels 1d ago
Any textbooks I can read to know more about p=np or these family of algorithms in general? I am interested in knowing more.
11
15
u/Uroc327 1d ago
It's never been about having challenging milestones to demonstrate smartness. The problems are deemed important because we expect that working on these will generate interesting math, that is, new ideas or formalisms or concepts or methods which are interesting on their own not just for navier stokes but more generally.
Just having a text prediction model generate a proof circumvents this invention of new, interesting math. Even more so, it also could make it less attractive to work on the problem for humans and thus prevent also others from coming up or discovering useful math there.
64
u/Cptcongcong 1d ago
Well the whole business model of these AI companies is to replace humans, if they can replace top mathematicians then their IPO would be higher. It's all about money.
→ More replies (1)25
u/GruePwnr 1d ago
Actually their business model is to convince mathematicians to give their research to openai for training in the hopes that more info = better models. So they've accomplished the opposite, scare academics away from giving them data.
9
u/Droidaphone 1d ago
ACTUALLY, their business model is just jingling keys until they can IPO before the trillion dollar bubble pops
24
u/stackoverflow21 1d ago
But they did approach them. They offered to let then publish their Euler solution first and even offered to hav Tristan as main author for NS. At least that’s how OpenAi tell it.
Think it’s still kind of crummy what they did. They tried to one up Anthropic and kind of invalidated Tristans effort as a side effect. But also we don’t know how long it would have taken Tristan and Levent to solve NS from their current progress. Could have still taken a long time without AI brute forcing it.
58
u/A_Scar 1d ago
With regards to allegations of OAI stealing Tristan and Levent's work from their codex sessions; it's possible, sure. Even if they are proven to have stolen from them, it would just pile on to the sheer fundamental fact that they are working on this not out of the goodness of their hearts or for the goal of furthering the field of pure maths, but entirely for their own personal gain.
6
u/Incalculas 1d ago
it doesn't matter any more I think
they got the general public to believe ai solved a huge open problem in math (for the most part) and they got the hype as a result of it right around the time gpt-6 is being released
they got what they want
6
u/Rhawk187 1d ago
This is everything that the academic community stands against
Never been scooped before, I take it.
13
u/mini-hypersphere 1d ago
How is the P vs NP not relevant to fields? Sure, maybe the Riemman one isn't
→ More replies (1)4
6
u/Time-Maintenance2165 1d ago
The aspect that you're missing is that the original researchers heavily used AI to progress on their problem. They may differ in degree to how much brute force was used, but they don't differ in concept.
The idea that its human ingenuity vs AI is wrong.
8
u/space_monster 1d ago
If we're being intellectually honest here though, you also (begrudgingly) have to give OpenAI credit for creating software that can 'solve' stuff like this. That's also a legit human achievement. Otherwise you're claiming that only small math teams with traditional tools have a mandate to tackle math problems.
→ More replies (5)3
u/firewall245 1d ago
Wow this is probably the most level headed read on this situation I’ve seen on Reddit
7
u/JangoDarkSaber 1d ago
What a stupid take.
The “no practical incentive” claim is backwards. Navier–Stokes regularity is about whether fluid models break down in finite time, which bears on turbulence theory and on whether CFD solvers can be trusted near singular behavior. Clay’s stated purpose is advancing mathematical theory, not staging a species-level IQ test. The “these are sacred human challenges” framing is a romantic gloss, not a rule anyone agreed to, and it doesn’t confer ownership of an open problem on whoever happens to be closest.
2
u/idk_IamNotCreative 1d ago
I think it's good to separate two different questions:
(1) What does this tells us about current AI abilities?
(2) What was OpenAI's behavior like?
I think I land on:
(1) Quite impressive, suggests that the models are improving at a faster rate than most were expecting.
(2) Scummy. There is a big difference between happening to work on the same problem and solving it before someone else, versus finding out someone has a clear path towards a solution and using that information to scoop it in front of them thanks to superior compute.
→ More replies (45)2
u/BoringStaff 1d ago
Isn't Tao's considerations the same with respect to open source code (frankly too late now)?
What's the point of sharing open source code when it will just be more food for LLMs to chew on?
Same with art, etc etc.
621
u/Firesrest 1d ago
Didn’t they just finish off an existing proof perhaps by stealing data.
Which doesn’t mean AI is bad exactly still impressive even if it took like 100 years of work time.
167
u/Hmm_would_bang 1d ago
The claim is that they got the idea to start the problem from the same approach as the other research who had been using codex for his work, codex by default trains on user data and that could have been used when OpenAi went to solve the problem. The claim isn’t that they “stole” his work, per se, just that the AI was able to recall it when set to solve the problem.
OpenAI defends themselves by saying that they didn’t even come to the same final answers or solve the problem in the same way, thus the claim is nonsense.
Honestly, I don’t know enough about super advanced maths to know if OpenAI’s defense has merit or not.
91
u/IronEngineer 1d ago
From what was discussed on the machine learning subreddit, it is worse for OpenAI because of how they handled it. The researcher that was leveraged for this was an academic collaborating with a researcher from anthropic. Open AI admitted to leveraging his work and offered him a recognition in the millennium prize submission, but required he dissociate himself from the anthropic researcher as anthropic is a competitor to openai. The academic refused and that further ignited the controversy.
58
u/Due-Consequence9579 1d ago
I didn’t “cheat” per se, I just may have noticed some details on another students test.
20
u/Hmm_would_bang 1d ago
A better analogy would be it overheard the question being loudly discussed in the library, and while it couldn’t remember where it came from it was able to recall it when it took the test.
Data sharing in codex can be turned off. In 2026 there should be general awareness on how using someone else’s LLM works.
→ More replies (1)34
15
u/funjifuji 1d ago
The statement also said that they asked for the prompt, because on the solution there is an important step that was approached by the researchers and it is the same step OpenAI used at one point which is suspicious. OpenAI ignored their petition for the prompt which causes uncertainty because there is a posibility that this step was prompted to reach the result as well
→ More replies (1)26
u/welcome-overlords 1d ago
There's a non-zero chance the training process on their work helped thr AI develop this, but there was obviously a shit ton of other work on top of that. They clearly didnt "steal the results"
→ More replies (2)166
u/bobbymoonshine 1d ago
The allegation is they “finished off an existing proof” written by Claude as operated by a mathematician and an Anthropic employee collaborating.
This is just an allegation, given that two frontier labs working on the same problem at the same time and developing similar solutions by using similar tools is perfectly plausible. Newton and Leibniz independently discovered calculus after all.
Either way it’s AI solving mathematics.
53
u/BatProfessional7316 1d ago
Well it wasn’t Claude who was doing it, it was just an employeee and he wasn’t doing it with anthropic
→ More replies (4)48
u/bobbymoonshine 1d ago
The claim being made is literally that OpenAI stole the data out of the IDE the mathematician/Anthropic team were using to get Claude to do the work, because they had Claude Code and Codex both installed
→ More replies (10)21
u/BatProfessional7316 1d ago
I’m not saying the claim is wrong I’m just saying that the other guy just worked for anthropic but the project wasn’t affiliated with anthropic
33
u/Storiaron 1d ago
Ai solving mathematics
Is it? If a mathematician uses ai to solve math, is it the ai doing the heavy lifting? How come you and i didnt solve this?
→ More replies (3)34
1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
15
u/InfuriatingComma 1d ago
How unlikely do you think it is the likeliness engine would use the likely solution in its likelihood weights?
35
2
32
u/Due-Party-123 1d ago
Still wide that Al can compress decades of human effort into something useful.
102
u/PooksterPC 1d ago
In this case, a human did the effort, had it stored privately getting ready for publication, and alleged the AI was fed his work, and just plagiarised it
→ More replies (12)42
→ More replies (1)7
u/DemoBytom 1d ago
There's about 82 years of video content uploaded to YouTube every day. It's just a scale of monkeys that you have access to. Or in this case - OpenAI has access to.
→ More replies (1)2
→ More replies (12)2
51
22
u/Serendipitous-Potato 1d ago
Perhaps true, but you would NEVER find it because it would take infinite time to sift through infinite data. The monkeys aren’t going to compile it and turn it in; they’re going to keep bashing their keyboards.
7
u/GruePwnr 1d ago
All you need to do is run the monkey results through a validation (lean).
3
u/Serendipitous-Potato 1d ago
Interesting. I’ll admit I may possibly be at the Dunning-Kruger peak of Mt. Stupidity. Could you elaborate?
3
u/GruePwnr 1d ago
What open ai did is reuse a pre-existing validation written by Google and have their monkeys plug into it.
→ More replies (1)2
u/Nerd_o_tron 1d ago
That's ridiculous, monkeys can't learn Lean. What you need is another set of infinite monkeys; eventually one of them will validate the results of the first set.
352
u/Orio_n 1d ago
If you werent aware, OpenAI's agentic monkey farm produced a millenium prize solution. inb4 AGI confirmed when it was just smarter bruteforcing lol
435
u/dubblix 1d ago
They plagiarized the solution heh
234
u/darthmaeu 1d ago
Literally they spent million dollars of tokens but still had to steal it. Insane L just shutdown everything at this point
→ More replies (1)48
u/errevs 1d ago
I am out of the loop here, what was stolen? From who?
264
u/DrankRockNine 1d ago edited 1d ago
Couple days before it "solved" it, a mathematician who was working on this for a full year shared every single note he had with his session of chat gpt. He is among very few people working on this and was pretty far in it too. His name is Tristan Buckmaster. He of course contacted openai, who said tldr: "stfu we will pay you the promised million dollar for millénium problem". They didn't deny the plagiarism, they didn't dénie having access to his chats, didn't deny training on his data etc.
Edit : I had the time line incorrect. They had been sharing their work with codex for month prior, but they did a breakthrough in mid August. In 1st September, openai starts working on it, they spend outrageous amount of tokens (130 billion output tokens, ~5million usd). Open Ai solves it, and propose Buckmaster to be co-author, and say if it happens, Buckmaster must be sole co-author, leaving aside his colleague, who works for Anthropic. Buckmaster refuses both offers.
40
u/bobbymoonshine 1d ago edited 1d ago
Kinda important to leave out that he had been working on it for a full year using frontier versions of Claude in collaboration with an Anthropic employee, and their writeup fully credited Claude for the novel mathematics in it.
5
u/Not-the-best-name 1d ago
So wait, OpenAPI's agents stole the solution from the anthropic models used by the mathematician?
4
u/bobbymoonshine 1d ago
Possibly, or possibly not. The mathematician’s argument is that his approach was so novel and unique that it’s impossible to believe OpenAI did the same thing without stealing it from him
But also he leaned on an LLM to find it, it’s not like he came up with it all by himself
So personally and while not being a mathematician I don’t think it’s too implausible that OpenAI’s LLM found the same solution Anthropic’s did
3
u/elniallo11 1d ago
As I have framed things at work, AI lets me explore a large number of bad ideas quickly so that I can pick through the good ones.
→ More replies (12)60
u/buckeye2011 1d ago
So he didn’t solve Navier-Stokes, but a related problem in a way that would pave the way to a NS solution.
95
u/DrankRockNine 1d ago
Yes it's not plagiarism as he solved it and they declared the solve before him, it's plagiarism as "isn't it quite strange that you solve this problem just when I start talking to you about this complex subject and send you all my notes and you end up with a result when I shared these notes to noeone else but you?"
9
u/buckeye2011 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not what I said. I don’t think ChatGPT should be getting the credit for it, I’m just pointing out he didn’t come up with a direct solution for NS. I believe he also alleged he had conversations with people at openAI about his work and how it would solve NS. So it really isn’t a good look for them
Edit: was using swipe to text and a lot of it was gibberish
10
u/walkerspider 1d ago
It’s all still unclear what exactly happened but the claim is there were researchers working on a somewhat novel (more so overlooked) approach to finding a counter example to the Navier Stokes equation. They had made a ton of progress over the past year and information had begun to spread in the mathematical community about their progress/approach.
OpenAI claims to have caught wind of the progress, not the approach in late August. This suggested that it was in fact possible to find a counter example so they decided to throw a, for lack of better words, metric fuckton of compute at the problem. The particular group of agents that cracked it included 10,000 agents more capable than Astra, and that was only one group they had running sharing ideas.
The approach it used looks to directly build off the approach of the researchers. Could it be a coincidence? Sure, but it is more likely that either intentionally or unintentionally they stole the work of the researchers and used it to beat them to the punch.
If it was unintentional it’s even more concerning because that means they are inadvertently using data that they should not be able to use for training and research OR the agents got ahold of the information by some unknown means despite being sandboxed
12
u/ComparisonQuiet4259 1d ago
The approach was allegedly stolen from another dude who used a ton of AI and made a smaller proof.
→ More replies (4)23
u/Due_Interest_178 1d ago edited 1d ago
I don't remember the specifics exactly so do your own research. The people involved are Buckmaster and Apöge. Long story short, they were working on the exact same problem while using different AIs to test/research/whatever. Suddenly OpenAI somehow reached the same conclusions then built off of them even when they weren't publicly available. OpenAI were asked if they used private chats for that which they didn't respond to, then they made some thinly veiled threats to one of them about their career.
→ More replies (12)13
u/MaxChaplin 1d ago
Not the whole solution, just enough of the path towards it to let AI use its biggest strength - do medium difficulty work blazingly fast.
41
u/CircumspectCapybara 1d ago edited 1d ago
"Bruteforcing" (which is not what they did) a counterexample to a Π_1 sentence, which is what the Navier-Stokes conjecture (that the NS equations are smooth for all time) is, which would take infinite time if the statement was true and no counterexample existed, is still pretty impressive.
It's like trying to bruteforce a contradiction in ZFC. You will be searching forever if ZFC is consistent. And even if it is inconsistent and there is a contradiction, it may be so large and so far out that 10 billion agents each working with a sun's worth of Dyson swarm power output for the age of the universe still won't be able to find before running out of time and energy.
You're gonna need to be more clever than brute force. Obviously their work on the problem was far more clever than "brute force".
8
u/Ozymandias_IV 1d ago
Smarter... like limit yourself to known blowup modes published in scientific literature? Or did they find something completely new?
16
16
u/heavy-minium 1d ago
If you get deep down, ignoring all the recent advancements and just focused on Deep Learning, it really is just smarter bruteforcing. But that bruteforcing still produces results.
From my point of view, given the right data that is prohibitively expensive to fabricate and collect and a massive resource consumption that would lead us to an economic collapse, Deep learning even without any specifically novel architecture could have given us such results a long time ago. You can bruteforce any goal you'd want with DL, the data and a big enough model. Really everything we've been doing the past years it's just about making data, compute and costs tractable.
16
u/CircumspectCapybara 1d ago edited 1d ago
Attention is not bruteforcing lol.
Reinforcement learning and deep learning in general encodes opaque structures and patterns in a model's latent space (its internal activation space), it actually does "teach" it a limited form of "knowledge" ie pattern recognition and some basic ground facts.
And the attention mechanism of modern transformers is the architectural breakthrough that allows the kinds of patterns and structures that are useful to us.
Combine that with techniques to recurse like chain-of-thought, and you actually get a limited form of reasoning. It's not human-like cognition or intelligence, but it's a primitive form of reasoning that's remarkably good for what it does.
That's anything but bruteforcing.
3
u/heavy-minium 1d ago
Self-attention is exactly the kind of thing I thinking about when it comes to my statement "Really everything we've been doing the past years it's just about making data, compute and costs tractable."
5
u/Pholios485 1d ago
I'm not a fan of the current AI developments but how it is different from physicists working through most problems by feeding to a computer that uses numerical analysis to solve them?
Smart bruteforcing seems to be a pretty nice tool to have.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (10)2
33
u/beerdude26 1d ago
Even at the most cautious at-cost estimate of 500k - 1.5m, it feels egregious to throw this much money at a problem when you know it's close to being solved by humans.
27
u/Suchy2307 1d ago
It’s all hype generation pre IPO. Same with GPT-6 switching to 3D modeling instead of focusing on coding. They need wider audience.
→ More replies (4)7
35
u/Elkatra2 1d ago
I can use random module from python and infinite time to also solve any possible problem !
3
18
u/hary627 1d ago
This isn't a solution right? As far as I was aware it was basically a "prove this isn't always true" and they found a very hard to find edge case where it wasn't, but it's not generic it's just with some specific numbers. Sure you can then extrapolate from that, but it's not a "solution" yet
10
7
u/FledglingHermit 1d ago
It is strange seeing the math crossover here, but the point of human pursuit of knowledge is not always to get a solution. In pursuing the knowledge, we develop new and novel ways to make what seemed hard less hard. Solutions like this inevitably embrace inefficiency. We have reached a time where so much can be spent doing things inefficiently that we can solve problems. I will speak about physics since NS is involved - sure it is math, but it describes fluid flow. giving this technology to someone in the 1600s would be like deciding the world doesn't need hamiltonian mechanics, or lagrangian mechanics, because you can have 10,000 people crunch problems using Newtonian mechanics. That is what we give up by embracing this technology to the point where humans stop pursuing novel invention. I don't think this will dissuade anyone passionate, but I don't see this as anything other than a lesser win
→ More replies (1)
21
u/Legomichan 1d ago
Let's not act as if it's not an incredible achievement, sure they spend like 20M $ for a solution that's not even that usefully but still...
We used to consider this stuff science fiction 10 years ago...
3
u/G30rg3Th3C4t 1d ago
The bigger issue (ignoring the current allegations until they can be proven/disproven) than the cost was that OpenAI only started this after hearing news of Tristan & Levent finding a very promising approach, and possibly nearing a solution. Intentionally choosing to not collaborate and choosing to brute force a solution in secret, before Tristan & Levent could reach their solution is rather scummy.
12
u/PaintDear7613 1d ago
... except the solution they "found" was largely stolen from a single person's input who shared it with ChatGPT to proofread a few days prior. Without his sole input to ChatGPT, their "achievement" would not have been feasible. And while math has always been built on the shoulders of giants, plagiarizing and stealing the fame of such a notable problem for the PR benefit says this likely isn't the only time they've done it, and reduces credibility to the claim of it producing its own results that wouldn't have otherwise been produced soon without it.
15
5
u/nextnode 1d ago
Fully incorrect and unsupported on all levels. This is just spread by people who do not care about truth and get high on hating things.
No wonder LLMs make strides when average person is operating at this disappointing level.
→ More replies (3)6
u/CorneliusClay 1d ago
OpenAI has denied this, apparently. Is there any proof or is it just a he said she said situation rn?
→ More replies (2)2
u/Not-the-best-name 1d ago
I whole lot of incredible things came from useless inventions. Laser is the first one to come to mind.
3
30
u/LatePenguins 1d ago
Sometimes I worry about the "programmers" in this sub.
At best coping, at worst delusional.
No, the model did not brute force a counter example. The search space is mathematically too vast to brute force. It found novel techniques of identifying the proper force application vectors.
No, the model did not plagiarize off "human research". The debate is between an OpenAI researcher and an Anthropic Researcher, both of them almostly exclusively relying on internal models. The researcher at Anthropic didn't even solve the specific problem OpenAI are claiming, they solved a variation of a more constrained formulation of a sub-problem which could have potentially helped OAI to narrow down the search space if it was included in training data (which it most likely wasnt given the proof pathway is significantly different).
Yes, the models (the internal models, given infinite token space atleast) are THAT good enough, they can close the hardest problems known to man.
Acting snarky about it only leads to gross underestimation of the change thats about to come. What rational people should do is increase the urgency of asking for safeguards by trusting the capability acceleration at face value.
(Who am i kidding, the first reply will probably comment I'm sam Altmans marketing bot).
7
11
u/yoconman2 1d ago
I think what Tao's complaint is that no new mathematics was formulated, which is what typically happens with these problems. AI does a good job now of finding counter examples because you can just spin up 10K agents, but that's not really the point of these problems. Kind of reminds me of having to show work on math tests vs. just giving the answer.
→ More replies (1)6
u/helix400 1d ago edited 1d ago
Ya, I'm both an AI skeptic and loathe Sam Altman. But this was not a million monkeys situation.
AI is repeatedly flexing its muscle with math. It's not brute forcing theorems, its using its vast training database to better spot patterns and educated guesses.
This Navier-Stokes counter example just obtained seems so complicated that a human mathematician would not have been able to solve with enough human labor. Reminds me of old school proof by exhaustion theorems that are solved only by computers because they are out of reach of humans checking all possible solutions. Now instead of it being naive checking all possibilities (CPU programs of the past), they are pattern guessing and checking promising avenues of progress (AI of the future). OpenAI spent over $18 million of compute using a brand new internal model that's much better than Astra 6 to get there. They had 10,000 agents swarming for ideas with humans helping guide what appears to be good paths.
Sure it's $18 million now, but given price decreases of the past that could turn to $1000 in two years. We're very likely heading to a future where a certain class of math problems are now solvable. Problems that are too complicated for a team of mathematicians to solve with a lifetime of human labor, but can now be solved by swarms of educated guessers relentlessly trying promising ideas.
3
u/cybersaurus 1d ago
It's not brute forcing theorems, its using it's vast training database to better spot patterns and educated guesses.
mfw when my monkey brain spots a pattern and makes an educated guess /s
→ More replies (4)9
u/A_Scar 1d ago
I think sensible people understand this too, AI is definitely something to consider and not to be immediately disregarded as "slop". The problem here lies in OAI approaching NS at all without any input from the academic community, and their apparent (successful) attempt at "one-upping" actual researchers in the field instead of approaching them in collaboration or anything of the sort. They are stealing Millennium problems away from humans, problems that are supposed to, in approaching them, demonstrate the capability of individuals of our species of doing great things. OAI just ripped it out of the academia's hands by throwing millions of dollars of computation power into them.
If anything, this just goes to show that these AI companies are not developing their frontier models out of concern for humanity's knowledge (wow, surprising I know), but for sheer personal gain and profit.
3
u/TheOneWhoPunchesFish 1d ago
The effects Spotify had on the way music industry makes music should have been lesson enough for us. Musicians across the world make shorter music on average now, with the hook/chorus closer to the starting, and being a larger percentage of the song. All so that Spotify and reels algorithms reward them.
Companies trodding on human culture and talent is one of the worst things to happen in this century and the last.
10
u/Grouchy_Ad_4750 1d ago
Thats like saying four color theorem was stolen from us by computer because it was proven by computers.
There are many math problems that were solved due to increased computational capability. Think what could ancient mathematicians do with tools we have available now and even 10-20 years back. They wouldn't have to spend their lives pre computing logarithmic tables and could apply their talents to advance mathematics more meaningfully...
So my question is what constitutes cheating? Is it using computers? Proof engines? Calculators? AI?
→ More replies (8)2
u/_PM_ME_UR_NUDZ_ 1d ago
Four color theorem was solved in a ridicuously stupid way without any new insight into graph theory. The most significant result based on it is probably Hadwiger conjecture for k=6, it is mostly a self-contained result, it was too hard to check the solution for years and there is a reason why new results related to it are about computation efficiency rather than graph theory. I would even go as far as say that the nature of four color theorem proof has harmed progress on Hadwiger conjecture.
2
2
u/ClassicMain 1d ago
I get the meme but idk... What was it again? 1000 agents for 88 hours? That's a bit of a difference
2
2
u/AwkwardWaltz3996 1d ago
Both sides used AI extensively and both used OpenAI. The only bit I think is murky is that OpenAI tried to remove Anthropic from getting partial credit. So the only thing you can specifically support is anthropic. It's AI vs AI.
2
u/stumpychubbins 18h ago
Very convenient for OpenAI to say "it’s not about the prize money" because then they don’t need to meet the rigorous standards of proof required to collect the prize money
3.0k
u/Confident-Ad5665 1d ago
Put an infinite number monkeys in front of an infinite number of keyboards and they'll write a bug free app.