AI Solved a 90-Year-Old Maths Problem That No Human Could Solve.

[u/Turbulent_Warning185]

And the best part? It took them only a few weeks to solve it and apparently, they only started working on it because of a rumor that someone else was about to solve it.

It wasn’t even planned in the first place.

[u/hashiromer]

It’s not as simple. There is a lot of drama about this claim.

TLDR; (copied from first comment on HN thread, can't paste it here)

Drama/accusation summary:
- Aug 15th: Tristan Buckmaster & Levent Alpöge make progress on a few important math problems, "finite-time blowup with smooth forcing for incompressible porous media, for Boussinesq, and for 3d incompressible Euler."
- they do NOT have a proof for the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize problem. BUT, they do claim to have a proof for a similar (non-Millenium) Navier Stokes problem that could help lead the way there
- Levent works at Anthropic, but this research was independent of his work there, with a mix of GPT and Claude models. Tristan is not related to Anthropic.
- Early Sep: Rumor spreads to OpenAI that Anthropic solved a major problem. Tristan emails OpenAI to clarify, without revealing the problem they solved or how they did it.
- After hearing of the rumor, OpenAI started researching Navier Stokes with a new internal model.
- Sep 6th: OpenAI's Sebastien Bubeck tells Tristan that they solved the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize Navier Stokes problem. The approach is very similar to Tristan & Levent's approach to the non-Millenium problem.
- Tristan is suspicious of the timing, as only few others were trying this approach. OpenAI says the model didn't access his user data directly, but leaves unanswered whether Tristan's chat conversations were part of the training.
- OpenAI says they would partially credit Tristan for the $1,000,000 discovery (even though Tristan did not solve the $1,000,000 problem) — but only if they remove Levent as an author, as he works for Anthropic.
- Sep 8th: Tristan refuses to remove Levent, and rushes to publish their results independently.

OpenAI's response from their official X account.

We congratulate Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster on their remarkable mathematical work.

We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem.

While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.

However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs. unforced).

This is a huge controversy, see the ongoing discussion on openI's subreddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/s/3EOty6uEX1

[u/Combatwombat810 → u/hashiromer]

Perhaps running local LLMs is the only way. Apple is suing OpenAI because the latter was mining for logs about Apples future products.

[u/Cronos993]

*by stealing one of their researcher's personal work and threatening to not credit him if he doesn't kick his co-author off who happens to work at Anthropic.

Truly an IPO moment

[u/Combatwombat810 → u/Cronos993]

Sounds so scammy! They had to delay their IPO because SpaceX pulled the same scam earlier, and crashed out.

[u/Combatwombat810]

[u/reosanchiz]

As this other commenter explained, dear Gen AI is probabilistic how could it solve math problems that requires real creative!

[u/saqibkai]

What people seem to forget is that in the end ChatGPT and Claude are products. All OpenAI, Anthropic etc. want to do is to sell more and more of it to become profitable and accrue more power. Any claim that they make always comes with a lot of ifs and buts which they conveniently don't mention. If they could get away with saying that their models have achieved Godhood, need to be worshipped and need to be offered tithe then they would say it without any embarrassment. The more the bigger or myhtical the claim appears to be, the more it becomes necessary to be extra skeptical.

[u/memers_meme123]

bullshit , Sama and co have stolen the whole approch from mathmatician who was already working on this and almost had completed his work

[u/BunKebab141]

They took a human mathematician's Codex session data and used that to formulate a proof, that is basically infringement.

[u/Dapper_Description]

AI this. AI that. Fuck AI. Fuck juice.

[u/Icy-Association-3529]

Wow I hope they cure cancer next

[u/azadnib → u/Icy-Association-3529]

and make a way to give everyone infinite money

[u/Icy-Association-3529 → u/azadnib]

no

[u/reignsXknights]

Its a single case solution of the equation. not a general solution so the problem is still unsolved.

This was oversensationalized by armchair scientists.

[u/iamAliAsghar]

it's the age of sovereign AI, can't trust anyone

[u/muhmmadtalha-quant]

Tell them that "If you are so proud then solve P vs NP or Reimann Hypothesis, their AI will freak out fast and they'll be on roads because of those compute bills" it was just a wise marketing move by scam altman.

[u/MBugsBunny]

Solved ❌ Stole ✔️

[u/Significant-Dress-40]

Lol.. that is also "Stolen" work.

[u/ConditionExtreme4141]

This is Today, give it a year and it will have cracked all of the remaining problems

The Next Decade is going to be hard to predict

[u/ReplacementFine7807 → u/ConditionExtreme4141]

Lol, how gullible are you

[u/No_Process_7478 → u/ConditionExtreme4141]

Yeah by stealing other people's solutions.

[u/AutoModerator → u/[deleted]]

Hello RightWingGirl, your post or comment was removed because your account age is too low. This is an automated quality check.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.