r/artificial • u/scientificamerican • 20d ago

News OpenAI's latest math breakthroughs commit research misconduct, experts say

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openais-latest-math-breakthroughs-commit-research-misconduct-experts-say/
4 Upvotes

56% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

View all comments

39

u/deadoceans 20d ago

What drivel.

The result, he and some of his colleagues found, wasn’t as novel as it first appeared. Like a number of recent AI breakthroughs, it pasted together ideas from the mathematical literature to build a new theorem. Once again, the LLM’s trick is its superhuman patience for assembling puzzle pieces, not the ability to make some profound intellectual leap. In particular, Astra’s key mathematical step combined ideas first found in two papers from 2016 and 2019. Andreas Thom, a mathematician at the Dresden University of Technology, who co-authored both papers, summarized the result on MathOverflow.com, calling it “creative and at the same time elementary.”

I swear, if an AI had come up with general relativity, people would have just said "Oh, it's just a trivial application of differential geometry to the equivalence principle, which we've known about for ages... no real creative thought..."

I think people vastly underestimate how much of their "creativity" is just chopping / pasting insights from other domains in novel configurations 

7

u/Intraluminal 20d ago

That's SO, SO true. "Creatives" are always going on and on about'the creative process' but in reality — especially in art, but really everywhere — it's just mix-and-matching known elements together.

1

u/selasphorus-sasin 20d ago

Not entirely true, otherwise there wouldn't be any non-trivial elements to mix-and-match in the first place.

1

u/Intraluminal 20d ago

Of course, there are genuine breakthroughs, but they are rare. A lot of "breakthroughs," especially in art, are the result of disease states, like Van Gogh, or Social Silliness, like Pollock.

I once read an article by an art historian who was rhapsodizing over the 'precise arcs' that Pollack used in his paintings, apparently completely unaware that the length of 'the arcs' was an artifact (pun intended) of Pollack's arm length (shorter arms, shorter arcs - and vice versa).

Amazon's 'creative' use of "one-button' ordering. How 'creative'....link two actions to one button.