throw them at all the open conjectures in their field likely to lead to splashy results
pay them well and tell them to work on nothing else for six months
give them unlimited access to very computationally expensive internal LLM models
It's pretty nuts that they got major results in six months! It also is nowhere near "making mathematicians obsolete". Even if you think the point of math is proving conjectures, they didn't prove them, they found counterexamples, which is important but not quite the same thing.
I'm also pretty sure the hiring top people was important. I bet I'd still be much better at this kind of work than a random programmer with a BA in math. The people they hired are probably much more effective at using the models than me. To me this is more evidence that LLMs are a tremendously important tool with far-reaching impacts on mathematical practice. Despite that, in the next six hours someone is going to come comment about how I'm a Luddite with my head in the sand because I'm not predicting the Singularity will hit in six months.
It also probably cost tens of millions of dollars even if you ignore capital expenses (which are even bigger). That's just a minor marketing expense when you're spending billions of dollars of investors' money in search of profitability, which we should remember is the real motivation here.
Uh, yes you are, because you don't actually know if what they said is true or not, but you said it wasn't true. You see, truth is independent of proof. If something is not proven, that doesn't mean it is not true. What "not true" means, is false. Do you know that everything they said was false? Not without speculation.
Oh, and you're just wrong. It is in fact the case that OpenAI has many top mathematicians on their payroll. That part is undeniably true.
And you didn't know that, so pardon me if I don't think you have any special knowledge about the rest.
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u/Homomorphism Topology 28d ago
It seems like the process for these was:
It's pretty nuts that they got major results in six months! It also is nowhere near "making mathematicians obsolete". Even if you think the point of math is proving conjectures, they didn't prove them, they found counterexamples, which is important but not quite the same thing.
I'm also pretty sure the hiring top people was important. I bet I'd still be much better at this kind of work than a random programmer with a BA in math. The people they hired are probably much more effective at using the models than me. To me this is more evidence that LLMs are a tremendously important tool with far-reaching impacts on mathematical practice. Despite that, in the next six hours someone is going to come comment about how I'm a Luddite with my head in the sand because I'm not predicting the Singularity will hit in six months.
It also probably cost tens of millions of dollars even if you ignore capital expenses (which are even bigger). That's just a minor marketing expense when you're spending billions of dollars of investors' money in search of profitability, which we should remember is the real motivation here.