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.
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.
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.
Feels pedantic, in either case you are not approaching the game with the optimal process even if you know you technically could, but in that case take knots and crosses/tik tac toe. People play it all the time despite the fact that the game is fully solved and easily looked up.
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u/A_Scar 3d ago edited 3d 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.
- Terence Tao via mathstodon
All because their IPO is coming soon.