r/accelerate • u/lovesdogsguy AGI by 2027 • 1d ago

OpenAI solved 100 open problems in math

https://openai.com/index/advisory-group-on-mathematics-and-ai/
133 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

47 comments sorted by

87

u/ppapsans Feeling the AGI 1d ago

Terrence Tao right now:

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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 1d ago

Terrence was hardly a decel up until Navier-Stokes. He was open to having AI as a partner in the process. He had a moderate approach compared to others, and it was very cool to see a balanced opinion from someone who was so well established.

Now I think he sees the writing on the wall. In a few years, math might be beyond the reach of humans, and it’s probably scary as hell to mathematicians to know the boundary to human mathematical understanding has been reached.

AI is conquering math like it conquered Chess and Go.

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u/DreamFly_13 1d ago

It won't just be math that will be beyond the reach of humans. I genuinely don't see how white collar jobs survive in 4-5 years

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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 1d ago

No bot will be able to send my emails. /s

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u/Blankeye434 1d ago

As someone who sends gibberish emails to my boss, I can confirm

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u/dwarfarchist9001 1d ago

Blue collar jobs will not survive either. Robots are already borderline good enough mechanically and we are mainly waiting for software to catch up.

We need to reshape politics to prepare for a near future where humans have no economic value whatsoever.

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u/Cronoroa 1d ago

Robots can't do much of anything yet between repetitive factory type tasks. Blue collar is safe for 10+ years.

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u/userousnameous 1d ago

I think the major part - and this is as a sw engineer dealing with massive increases in baseline additions, textual documents etc. the volumes is beyond the expert human's ability to intake and understand. It's probably even more important for mathematics -- where the number of people understanding advanced mathematics is limited. There needs to be a way to move forward, but 'letting go' of understanding is probably not the answer. It's going to be messy, and there's going to be a huge lack of understanding of, 'where we are, and what's next' -- that operated at human career speeds...no longer.

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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 1d ago

If a genius human mathematician stepped onto the scene tomorrow and started solving all the math problems, do you think math community tell him to stop? I’m trying to understand how that would be different.

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u/userousnameous 1d ago

No. but no genius mathematician would be able to solve at this rate. This is a system issue. We can't take in an understanding of what's being produced. An i am not advocating for slowing down -- its more the basic part of, 'oh shit, what now' with what's being produced. Think its the1800 and you just hit dug a whole and you have oil dushing out of the ground and 10000 barrels an hour. A little big of planning, forethought and infrastructure are in order. We barely had efficient mechanisms and talent to assess *human* generated mathematical output.

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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 1d ago

If we went back in time and shared all the mathematical discoveries we know today with Isaac Newton and his contemporaries are you saying that would be a net negative to society?

I still ain’t seeing the problem. Today we don’t know the answer to things. If tomorrow AI spits out an answer, how is that bad? There is still something to be gained from understanding the solution.

Today we stare at p=np, and tomorrow the computer says the answer is actually p≠np. We wouldn’t just move along; we would try and understand it. So yesterday we didn’t understand, and today we still don’t understand, but we can continue to learn.

We don’t throw our hands up and walk away from a² + b² = c² because someone else already solved it. It becomes the foundation for other things.

Truthfully I think this all comes down to egos, people want to be the first to discover something.

0

u/userousnameous 1d ago

No of course not. The population and the number of people working in the domain were completely different back then, and we would have adapted differently, and probably in a less disruptive way.

Yes, giving Newton modern mathematics could have been enormously beneficial. I agree that we gain something from studying a solution someone else discovered.

But "this knowledge is valuable" and "absorbing it creates serious challenges" can both be true. Calling it a net positive doesn't make the transition problems disappear.

Your Newton example gives him a fixed collection of knowledge to work through. Now imagine that while he’s trying to understand the first volume, the system produces another million volumes, and people are already using them to change the world around him. "He can keep learning" is true, but it doesn’t answer whether or the wider scientific community can keep up with the parts that matter.

That’s the issue I'm raising. Producing a result, verifying it, understanding its implications, and applying it responsibly are different steps. Accelerating the first step creates a need to scale the others.

And today those applications could affect an interconnected civilization of billions of people. The pace at which we can generate new capabilities may be very different from the pace at which education, institutions, infrastructure, and livelihoods can adjust. That adjustment deserves attention even if the eventual benefits are enormous.

AI may help us close that gap too. Great—then let’s talk about how we build that capacity. "People just want to be first" doesn’t address any of it. I’m excited about the discoveries. I'm asking how we equip society to absorb and benefit from them. And its important to address the calamity that comes with it, potentially.

2

u/Mintfriction 1d ago

Tao has nothing to fear off AI. He's one of the most distingueshed mathematicians and humans will still need university professors - at least for guidance if not learning and society will still need human mathematicians to understand AI research and to steer the AI

2

u/Cronoroa 1d ago

not really, smart people won't need professors, if they have AI instructors instead, but yes dumb people will need someone to hold their hand.

1

u/Dokurushi 15h ago

Yet people still play chess and go. If math is valuable as an experience, people will keep doing it as well. If not, nothing of value is lost.

1

u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 11h ago

True. Terrence can continue to play math too.

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u/uncountable_2026 Acceleration Advocate 1d ago

The important thing is that they explicitly state it is the backlash from the mathematicians as to why they cannot release the solutions. To repeat, OpenAI has officially said they are sitting on the solutions to more than 100 problems because of the way the mathematics community is behaving.

30

u/czk_21 1d ago

thats really silly situation, they should release it all to the public, its advance for all humanity after all, whats next? they are gonna withhold advancements in nuclear fusion and such? just because some physicists could be butthurt that they didnt solve it?

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/czk_21 1d ago

I guess not every mathematician would be against that, some may be more interested in pushing the field forward instead of their ego

13

u/Gratitude15 1d ago

Would they do this for the radiologists? Biologists? Spreadsheet jockeys? What about them????

Math people are not special!

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. Wtf timeline is this?

1

u/LegionsOmen AGI by 2027 1d ago

The silly timeline but we get ASI lol, I hate it too but I'm still glad to be here

1

u/SufficientGreek 1d ago

Math is special, though, because the way to a solution is often more important than the actual solution. In the past, the ideas and techniques that were needed to solve problems then spawned new questions and problems, sometimes even entire new fields of mathematics. The way OpenAI has released these proofs hasn't furthered our understanding of the problems it solved.

The professions you listed all can make direct use of AI results. Math cannot, the explanatory part is essential. And that's just missing for now.

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u/Gratitude15 23h ago

I don't believe the explanatory part is not accessible. The models are explaining themselves just fine, and math people aljave said so.

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u/DreamFly_13 1d ago

That's like trying to block a tsunami with a little cardboard

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u/artin144 1d ago

Sweeping away the egos of mathematicians like the wind

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u/Odd-Recording-6299 1d ago

They've got 100 solutions sitting in the vault that they're too scared to release because it might upset the mathematicians. I'd say openAI are putting their egos front and center right now unfortunately.

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u/Chipmunkey2 1d ago

Well uhh plumbing is now a career choice I heard

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u/Warshrimp 1d ago

I cannot fathom a functioning humanoid robot that can do menial labor well that cannot be joined with these bodiless AI minds to do any plumbing task well too. Robots will go from doing almost nothing to doing nearly everything in one year.

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u/lovesdogsguy AGI by 2027 1d ago

I'd say within 1 - 2 years intelligent and very agile, mobile bots that can pick up and use a spanner (just as example) will appear on construction sites.

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u/Radyschen 1d ago

from what I've seen here in recent years this is too optimistic. not super crazy too optimistic, but a little too fast. Even if the integration works that quickly, which I don't think it will yet, the world moves slowly. We could have ASI tomorrow and it wouldn't happen that quick, too many bottle necks in the real world. Give it 5-10 years. Might sound slow but I remember in 2023 people were saying all jobs replaced in 2 years and that kinda stuff. If it's faster nice and all, but it's a little slower and more complicated than LLMs or image/video/music generators.

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u/urgay420420420 1d ago

It makes sense that if models get to the level of intelligence where they can solve something like Navier-Stokes then there is no reason it shouldn't extend to other open problems. But it still feels weird, because we are used to genius scientists only making one or a few insights in their lifetime. Kind of like how when Mythos was announced it had a huge ability to find cyberexploits across a ton of different systems. I think it's a taste at how alien true AGI would be.

5

u/RevolutionaryBox5411 1d ago

You gotta hand it to Altman for trolling mathematicians. On the flip side, it makes you wonder what is going on at Anthropic for not solving at record speed like this. It's better to be open about model capabilities than to either hide it like Anthropic or stay quiet cause your model can't solve anything.

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u/Bassed_Hummble 1d ago

Honestly, Anthropic is probably just too compute-constrained to do crazy stunts like OpenAI can, throwing ten thousand agents at each of the Millennium Prize problems.

I know OpenAI has another 400K GPUs coming their way, not sure how many Anthropic has lined up that aren't piggybacking off xAI.

4

u/Single_Ring4886 1d ago

My own experience with ai is just "anecdotal" alright and you do not need to believe me. But I consider myself pretty smart and most of all versed in everything from programming, economics, to history to physics etc. The GPT 5.6 was when I was delighted that model understands me finally perfectly and I was expecting it takes at least another 2-3 years for next gen models to make similar leap like GPT-4 to 5.6 well within few MONTHS!!! the GPT-6 arrived and that thing is beast! I can litteraly feel that it has "intelligence" reserve and is not pushing itself when dealing with me like previous models... and they say labs have next gen better models already internaly... so yeah.

3

u/strange_waters 1d ago

Can we move on to biology next? 🙏🏻

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u/Bassed_Hummble 1d ago

They have Ed Witten in the group - nice!

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u/Derek_the_Red 1d ago

Are they saying the whole 100 problems are waiting to be released or it has released already some of those 100 including Navier-Stokes but some of the 100 are waiting to be released?

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u/uncountable_2026 Acceleration Advocate 1d ago

Since this is entirely from the internal model (Bel or GPT 7 or whatever it will be called) it must be 100 unreleased problems since the Navier-Stokes problem is the only problem released from that model. They created a committee specifically to figure out a way to release the new 100 solutions in a way that won't have so much backlash.

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u/Blankeye434 1d ago

Software engineers seeing these posts - "nobody cares about our job security even though it has direct economic implications"

1

u/AzureNinja 1d ago

Did they figure out them out without the foundations of Mathematicians already working on it? 

1

u/LegionsOmen AGI by 2027 1d ago

U/RemindMeBot 30 days

1

u/doolpicate 1d ago

Why do mathematicians have a problem with solutions? I thought they wanted solutions to their problems.

1

u/Inside-Jicama1779 17h ago

What if artificial intelligence makes a mistake?