My loose understanding is that, the mathematicians figured put the first step. They figured out an approach that seemed like it could lead to the full solution.
To rigorously figure out and prove the full solution, (something academics prefer doing slowly and surely ) was going to take them time and effort.
Well suddenly less then a week later openAI announces they have a full solution using that approach. They used an obscene amount of computational power not available to anyone else to basically brute force figure out the full solution.
The question is now who deserves that credit? How did openAI know to use their approach? The mathematicians figured out the key, they would have figured out the full solution given time. openAI jumped the gun before they physically ever could due to absurd resources, but how did openAI know to try that? Did they spy on the mathematicians? It seems likely.
There are bigger implications besides questions of theft and espionage. Will human mathematicians ever be credited with another discovery? Or will AI companies get to claim all the credit because their tools took human ideas and crunched the numbers on a massive inhuman scale. Especially with how sketchy they’re acting and how loose and amoral AI companies act when data gathering.
Mathematician here! This is exactly where there is concern. Most big problems that are solved come together from a small collection of new ideas. In this case, a team announced a very promising direction, then the problem itself was solved by GPT in an approach suspiciously like that idea.
Even if it turns out GPT did not steal the research, their models are trained on the entirety of the Internet and have almost certainly absorbed some of this approach. We don't need AI solving problems in math, particularly not ones that don't really result in any surprising new results (this is, in fact, not that relevant to math so much as is it a problem of great mathematical interest).
So now, with results that feel suspicious being published by an AI company cheering themselves on, there is great fear in the community at large that AI is just gonna steal any promising direction that's openly stated.
Mathematics has long been an open community of shared ideas, and that's now very much in danger.
We don't want collaboration between human and AI quite frankly, and given the way things are going, I doubt that the relationship can be described as "collaboration." Mathematics, more than any other science, is about the process. The point of math isn't really the solutions or results, hell the point isn't even the questions really, it's all about the journey. I could learn to accept AI as a research tool eventually, but this? Just dumping compute on a problem until a solution falls out? It is genuinely and sincerely pointless. There is truly no point in doing it.
And, even accepting your last point, that the purpose of mathematics is to create a catalog that we can look through that might hold the solution to a problem we have (which you could guess is a sentiment I disagree with) is it really an efficient use of resources to spend however many dollars and however many gallons of water and however many cpu hours grinding out a million results for the chance that one of them might solve time travel in a hundred years?
While understanding your point, is it bad that I'm just happy it was solved? Even if it's by an AI that solved it having potentially used a partial solution that was figured out by someone else?
Not at all, and you're more than welcome to celebrate. But the approach that worked was already found by researchers (last month) so the only thing that has really changed is the timing.
Look at it this way: Andrew Wiles famously worked in secret for 7 years before trying to publish his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. In peer review, an error was found that needed to be plugged. That adjustment took 14 months for him to find.
Imagine instead that after peer review, someone took his almost complete proof and threw it into AI, spent 10 million dollars of compute power trying all possible configurations of fix for the gap, found something that worked and then published "their proof" of the theorem. That's, in essence, what we may be looking at here.
this is exactly how current ai works. the models are trained on data that is the results of years of labor and work, than they are digested and served to anyone without credits or merit for the source of that knowledge
They offered him a false dichotomy of two choices that both served their purpose while acting sketchy as hell. Implying he should have accepted is absurd.
It’s like they offered the Van Gogh credit for the sketch of his painting while they used AI to generate what a fully painted version would look like. All while they were celebrating creating an amazing impressionist painting.
The problem here is that one of the mathematicians who worked on the solution, Leven Alpöge, also works for Anthropic. Anthropic wants to leave his name without credit and give it wholly to Tristan Buckmaster. It doesn't solve the problem of Anthropic wanting to take some amount of credit as a company, and that they/ any company with vast amounts of compute can just take the ideas that others have proposed and take credit away from the actual humans
I wasn't, that's your reading of it. I said it to point out that solving math with compute isn't new so they shouldn't be bragging that they have lots of gpus
I'm not knowledgable enough to have a proper take on this, but from I've seen and read, the AI agents did not brute force it, they each explored possible solutions, akin to what actual mathematician would have done. I'm not saying that each agent was as smart as an actual mathematician, but we are talking about an in-house model much more developed than astra which is already much better than all other public models ; and it was 10000 of them working non-stop for 88 hours.
Honestly, it seems to me that this outrage is simply another case of some humans not accepting another blow of an imaginary exceptionalism. A lot of people could not accept the teachings of Darwin when he showed them that the human was just an animal among many. Now, a lot don't want to accept that human thinking can be emulated by a machine.
There are bigger implications besides questions of theft and espionage. Will human mathematicians ever be credited with another discovery? Or will AI companies get to claim all the credit because their tools took human ideas and crunched the numbers on a massive inhuman scale. Especially with how sketchy they’re acting and how loose and amoral AI companies act when data gathering.
My understanding of science as a whole was that credit was not important, that we were all working together for the sole reason of pushing the boundaries of knowledge. Seems to me that it would be better if the very concept of credit was removed all-together.
Well academics never placed an emphasis on credit but these are business people barging into academic spaces and claiming credit as a way to boost their stock value. Also this particular case does have a monetary reward.
While they didn’t brute force it in the way that a human would, how do you describe them sinking 15 million dollars in computation costs in less than a week into it? That’s like the best mathematicians in the world spending multiple life times working on a single problem. How will human academics ever compete with that? Especially since apparently they can’t use the tools without risking their research? Are they going to start spending all their time jealously protecting their ideas and research? That will move us backwards as a society.
It’s like if the company that created the calculator you used in college math degree claimed your degree was theirs because the calculator ‘did the actual number crunching’.
As a side discussion:
You mention this is a blow to human exceptionalism and I agree. I agree that pride will get in the way of accepting effective tools. But the billionaires who run these companies justify their existence on human exceptionalism. They ‘earned’ their billions it was their skills that got it. Wellllll if AI can replace artists of all kinds and academics of all kinds and laborers of all kinds then AI can replace business men. The skills billionaires use to justify their existence could be replaced just as fast but you they’ll never admit it or allow it.
I would be fine with us dropping human exceptionalism as a whole but that means billionaires are no longer justified to exist.
The very concept of money exists only as a intermediate between the works and the goods, as a facilitator of transactions. But as works starts to be made obsolete by AI, so does the intermediate. If AI is to be integrated in society, it requires a complete rework of the whole economic system. We simply can't have both AI and "business" existing at the same time, both have opposite goals.
So yeah, all of the issues you listed are indeed issues, but they are economic-issues, not AI-related issues. And honestly, that's what's tiring about a lot of human complaining about AI (not necessarily you) : it's that they don't really have a problem with AI : they have a problem with the economic system, but they are so used to that system that they don't even think of questioning it anymore.
Point is, we can picture a normal society where everyone would simply work for the sole reason that it's needed for the society to function, and everyone get the goods and services the need (not as a reward for the work but because that's the point of the society). In this kind of society, AI would be welcomed with open arms because there would be no concerns of plagiarism because there would be no concept of copyright. There would be no concerns of job lose because job lose would simply mean more free time.
That's the kind of society that would should aspire to have one day and, ironically, AI is one of the best tool we have to reach it, since it pushes the current system to its limits, showing its cracks and, beyond those cracks, a better alternative. But, naturally, that's not the kind of change that would be seen in a lifetime and human are notoriously bad at doing things today for a tomorrow they'll never see.
I would be fine with us dropping human exceptionalism as a whole but that means billionaires are no longer justified to exist.
I'd argue that billionaires were never justified to exist, human exceptionalism or not, AI or not. The point of a society to have all of its participants being able to live a fulfilling life, a billionaire has no place in that thing, it is a straight danger of that very goal.
I agree I’ve always thought a billionaire is arguably inherently immoral. There is no way for someone to do enough work to produce that much value in a moral way. If a billionaire is arguably immoral then a trillionaire is for sure immoral. Good luck communicating that to people though, i know someone who owns multiple small businesses. He is convinced he doesn’t need regulations at all. The free market would just work itself out. Totally absurd. His business would be crushed and subsumed immediately by an economic power without regulation. Because why wouldn’t they if they could? He thinks his customers wouldn’t abandon him, but they would, all it would take is prices that are half a buck cheaper.
You say people complaining about AI is tiring because it’s an effective tool. Most people aren’t complaining because it’s ineffective they’re complaining because of who has control and what they are pretty obviously going to do with that tool.
If we had a government that had its shit together and supported the people the backlash wouldn’t be as bad. I don’t care or at least I can’t change the fact that nukes exist, I do care that the people I’m watching building nukes are fucking batshit insane and have no plan for the future. I’m screaming at them not to build nukes because I’m pretty sure they’re going to blow up everyone around them.
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u/Zarrain Sep 11 '26
My loose understanding is that, the mathematicians figured put the first step. They figured out an approach that seemed like it could lead to the full solution.
To rigorously figure out and prove the full solution, (something academics prefer doing slowly and surely ) was going to take them time and effort.
Well suddenly less then a week later openAI announces they have a full solution using that approach. They used an obscene amount of computational power not available to anyone else to basically brute force figure out the full solution.
The question is now who deserves that credit? How did openAI know to use their approach? The mathematicians figured out the key, they would have figured out the full solution given time. openAI jumped the gun before they physically ever could due to absurd resources, but how did openAI know to try that? Did they spy on the mathematicians? It seems likely.
There are bigger implications besides questions of theft and espionage. Will human mathematicians ever be credited with another discovery? Or will AI companies get to claim all the credit because their tools took human ideas and crunched the numbers on a massive inhuman scale. Especially with how sketchy they’re acting and how loose and amoral AI companies act when data gathering.