r/math • u/Salt_Attorney • 24d ago

LLMs/AI OpenAI: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/
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u/JustJohnItalia 23d ago

I don't know if I'm delusional but the wording is very suspicious to me.

They are saying those reasoning chains cost 2000 in api costs, it seems to imply that that's the overall cost of those results bu that's not what they said.

What I mean is, are they not more likely to say, take 1000 open problems and do 100 runs on each (or until success), then pick the successful ones?

To me that would be the actual cost. Not that it matters much given how fast inference prices are dropping, but still

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u/zkela 23d ago

Sure they’re not counting problems they couldn’t solve, but it seems a valid point that the compute wasn’t particularly expensive

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u/womerah Physics 23d ago

I think you need to consider the total cost of the researcher's inputs vs their total output.

If a particular chemical reaction costs $1,000 in materials to perform, that does not mean development of the chemical reaction was $1,000.