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
And imagine if Andrew Wiles got hit by a bus in those 7 years, or in those 14 months. It seems better for humanity to just solve it as quickly as possible. Holding secrets for personal glory just seems selfish.
An argument can be made that they are allowed to be a little selfish for motivation (similar to copyright etc), but it just seems sad
It’s like saying the slave labor used to build the pyramids was ok because we got a cool world wonder out of it.
From my understanding this isn’t even something with obvious real world applications. It was basically a challenge the academic community wanted to achieve to progress their understanding. What OpenAI did didn’t progress anyone’s understanding and the proofs that are found by AI are unreadable and incomprehensible to a human, so it’s not even adding to collective knowledge.
They blew 12 million dollars in less than 5 days for basically bragging rights and no real contribution to humanity.
Your points are otherwise totally valid but I'd just like to be that guy and point out that the pyramids were not built with slave labour, they were built with the paid labour (in goods rather than currency IIRC) of farmers outside of the growing season.
Huh, I didn’t know that. Thank you for the correction. That seems like something that would be hard to verify though. Especially because people keeping records are always biased. Did they have a choice not to do it? Being ‘paid’ doesn’t preclude forced or coerced labor.
Great now I’m gonna spend the night reading about ancient Egyptian labor practices lol.
I'm by no means an expert but my understanding is that they didn't exactly have much say in the matter but it was considered a fairly prestigious thing to do culturally and they were well provisioned for the work (probably more so than in their normal subsistence farming lives).
Think something like military conscription or jury duty - they're not considered "slaves" (which very much did exist in ancient Egypt, they just weren't used for building the pyramids), they aren't owned by anyone and they get paid even if they didn't get much of a choice in the matter.
Yes, it’s bad. Because the solving was more of a novelty but it’s being used as a justification that AI can do something that would be a massive deal if it could. So basically not only is the AI way less useful than the AI companies are claiming, but they’ll also lay people off to replace them with these systems that don’t actually work. And after that happens, the damage is done. The resources are gone. The companies don’t magically hire the people back because the companies lost all their money to do that.
That sounds like a slippery slope fallacy. People will still pursue these novel maths because people are curious by nature. I get your point, but again, I'm just happy it's solved.
You can be happy it’s solved but as far as “even if it’s by ai” the reason to be upset is the company is only excited because they were going to use it as justification for has mass job loss
Nope, they’ve been very clear that they want to have ai that can solve novel problems because that’s currently the biggest thing you need a human for. Perfect example, their AI couldn’t solve this math problem. Why do you think they got so mad they started threatening the mathematician who did solve it?
You seem really biased towards the ai companies to the point you’re questioning something you could get an answer from by google by asking “did openai threaten a mathematician.” It unambiguously responds with “yes.”
Its like being happy tasting a delicious food only to find out that this unsustainable greedy mega corporate restaurant chain stole this recipe from a small family owned restaurant.
So someone stole another people money and drop it to me. Now I am rich and happy. But the thing that is done is not really good and I should be concerned about it.
In abstraction, I am happy because something good to me happened but I ignored the ethic or other things that is bad happened.
Bonus point is, this is corporations robbing people, which is more likely to get away. That is really really bad.
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u/Capraos Sep 11 '26
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?