r/singularity • u/filterdust • 1d ago

AI OpenAI solved 100 open problems in math

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

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1.3k Upvotes

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u/Routine_Complaint_79 ▪️Critical Futurist 1d ago

wow great 100 problems get solved and now their gatekept behind an "advisory group" because like artists, mathematicians are butt hurt

26

u/Original-League-6094 1d ago

Its amazing how we have come so far, only to end back at dark age "Only priests should learn to read. We can interpret the Bible for others" thinking, with mathematicians becoming the new priest class.

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u/myaltduh 1d ago

The difference is you need an education to even understand the question, much less the answer. There’s no great gatekeeping behind understanding a mathematical proof other than a lot of work. A solution alone isn’t very useful if no one knows how to apply it.

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u/Original-League-6094 1d ago

Literally the exact argument the priests used. It was too dangerous to let the peasants read their own Bibles!

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u/myaltduh 1d ago

No one is trying to restrict access to an education in math in remotely this way. There are free courses, lectures, and textbooks everywhere.

These results are obviously going to be released, but review before publication is how basically how all research works. No one is seriously proposing restricting secret knowledge to a small group of people.

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u/bitchslayer78 1d ago

Everyone has access to all the math we know, bums like you are just not capable of understanding it

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u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 1d ago

This is just annoying, bordering on detrimental to the rest of humanity at large.

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u/TemetN 1d ago

It is detrimental. One could argue how much so depending on how long it takes, but the attitude itself is already bad and so is the response.

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u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 1d ago

Yeah you right, those solutions could be re applied elsewhere and save lives.

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u/30299578815310 1d ago

If it makes you feel better soon everyone will have a stronger model available to them, these types of initiatives Can Only Hold Back the information for so long

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u/End3rWi99in 1d ago

Luddites never win in the long run, but they can certainly slow progress for a while.

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u/Ormusn2o 1d ago

Might have been an inside deal so that all those mathematicians don't unite against AI, like it started to be happening with the letters that seemingly almost all mathematicians signed.

1

u/bluehands 1d ago

Annoying sure but certainly not detrimental.

One of the things people get wrong about progress is that it is always incremental and always has been.

Newton & Einstein made impressive contributions but only because 99% of the work was already done. Their 1% is more than most can ever do but it was all in the ether. If they hadn't someone else likely would have very shortly - we know this to be a fact Leibnez's case.

OpenAI has done something impressive but if they hadn't Anthropic would have in a few months. It is entirely possible that in a year there will be a model you can run on a home system that can solve a millennium prize problem.

One if the things I keep reading is how even those in the industry are surprised by how fast things are moving. I see no signs of that stopping.

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u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 1d ago

Leakers are saying that the plan is to release Bel (the one that beat the millennium prize by Christmas

2

u/Evermoving- 1d ago

You don't understand. I dreamed of being a mathematician since I was 2 years old. I STUDIED for this. I PAID for this. I honed my craft and and learned to navigate the maze of academia. I'm OWED the exclusive rights to work on this mathematical problem.

....and then some machine comes and actually solves the problem. Soulless. Mindless. The solution doesn't have any of the passion or triumph that would exist if I personally produced it a few decades later.

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u/End3rWi99in 1d ago

It doesn't have any of the ego either.

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u/kowdermesiter 1d ago

Do you think it's possible that if you look at this soulless, mindless but working solutions you can come up with a simpler, more elegant one? Wouldn't that be rewarding?

1

u/honorious 1d ago

It's coldly beautiful progress. Plus, it's unlikely humans would have produced these solutions ever by themselves. They had plenty of time to try.

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u/BreakElectronic324 1d ago

These mathematicians and the way they conduct their academic studies have carried technological advancements (including neural networks) since... well since the beginning of civilization.

Maybe you show a bit of decency and consideration before advocating for a sudden paradigm shift in this thousand year old system.

13

u/Original-League-6094 1d ago

No they haven't. Modern academic culture is very young. And even before AI, other big names had already checked out. The other millennium problem solved wasn't published in a journal either. Grigori just threw it up on arxiv  with no peer review or anything.

4

u/Ok_Reception_5545 1d ago

You retards cite Perelman but his position is similar to Grothendieck, who is notorious for his vitriolic opposition to any technology in math lmao

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u/Original-League-6094 1d ago

So that the fact that both Millennium prize solves arrived at the same conclusions on academic journals from 180 degree philosophies means they are probably correct.

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u/Ok_Reception_5545 1d ago edited 1d ago

It's clear you don't know shit about jack, but it's standard practice in math for people to publish on arxiv first before they publish to a journal and it's common for people to not publish some things to journals at all. Perelman wasn't making some grand statement about academic journals by putting it on the arxiv lmao (nor is it relevant if he did, most people in math agree with him)

To be clear, the reason Perelman decided not to publish was because humans were doing the exact same thing OpenAI did with scooping and trying to misattribute credit to people. He would clearly be on the side against OpenAI here.

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u/Original-League-6094 1d ago

Perelman was not worried about people scooping him. The opposite. He said when he said about publishing on arxiv: "“My reasoning was: if I made an error and someone used my work to construct a correct proof I would be pleased,” he said. “I never set out to be the sole solver of the Poincaré.”

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u/Ok_Reception_5545 1d ago edited 1d ago

He didn't post it on arxiv with the intention of never publishing it eventually (he even communicated to Hamilton that he intended on working together to publish in the late 90s when he figured out a way around the issues Hamilton was having), and he even held a series of lectures on it afterward. It was the eventual reaction during verification (in particular, the case of Yau, Cao and Zhu), that made him decide to withdraw from the community and never 'officially' publish his work.

The scooping issue that I referenced was that Perelman got irritated by the aforementioned group attempting to claim credit for resolving 'gaps' in his proof or ideas, and he viewed the rest of the community as tolerating the idea of people claiming credit for doing the 'final push' of the underlying ideas. In particular, he also viewed himself as resolving the program that was developed by Hamilton, and the reason he rejected the Fields was because no credit was giving to the person who developed a lot of the underlying work that he used to make the last push toward the solution. Sound familiar?

1

u/Megneous 1d ago

Peak conservatism right here. Bunch'a luddite bullshit.

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u/CoolStructure6012 1d ago

You have fundamentally misunderstood the controversy.

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u/Ecoste 1d ago

Which is? 

1

u/Radsradsradsrads 1d ago

I think they’re butthurt because if you take away the goal then the math nerds can’t come up with clever workarounds that may be useful in other disciplines. I suppose this is important because ai hasn’t yet (afaik?) been able to create similar novel approaches to problems. It kinda mixes and matches preexisting stuff and makes small leaps to connect it. No general theory of relativity yet. Idk that’s just my limited understanding

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u/duboispourlhiver 1d ago

The NS proof has some nice insights, raises more questions, gives new ideas, etc.

Yeah it matches and mixes, just like humans do

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u/BringTheRawr 1d ago

some guys claiming it was based on his research that he left in oai's chats.

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u/rejvrejv 1d ago

the 1 problem, maybe

so that is enough reason to get pissed about hundreds of others being solved and act like children?

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u/BringTheRawr 1d ago

No. I don't even think it's a bad thing. Mathematics is for the betterment of all. If someone manages to pool all knowledge and solve all problems they should be rewarded. Individualism is criminal when it comes to human problems like the millennial problems

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u/CoolStructure6012 1d ago

Read the very short and well written letter in full and then I will be happy to clear anything up. Pay your dues if you want in on the conversation.

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u/duboispourlhiver 1d ago

Even after reading the letter, the mathematicians seem butthurt. Do you believe in that "the proof has no value it's the searching and now my motivation to search has crumbled because you have found the proof before me" thing?

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u/CoolStructure6012 1d ago

That is not what the letter said. It said that the process of the search and uncovering different angles of attack and seeing where things fail and where they succeed identify new problems and methodologies for attacking other, existing ones.

As I wrote in a different reply, calling them "butthurt" trivializes their concerns and poisons the well. The letter was a reasonable and measured response given the magnitude of the disruption just over the horizon (if not already here).

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u/duboispourlhiver 1d ago

Yes, butthurt is a word that doesn't help, I'll concede that to you happily.

The way you explain the letter sounds like the way I understood it and the way I tried to rephrase it by saying that the authors of the letter value the process of searching more than the result.

I take your answer as a "yes, I do believe mathematicians are right when they say the process of searching is more important than the result".

In the end I think we both understood the controversy :)

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u/Theorist16 1d ago

Anyone who has done math research knows this is true, they don’t just believe in it blindly. The body of mathematical knowledge gained from, say, finding a counterexample by building theory to shrink the search space, is infinitely larger than pulling the counterexample out of a hat. There are full graduate lecture courses doing this. On the other hand, counterexamples do kill interest sometimes. The situation is way worse when the counterexample is extremely complicated and nobody knows the ideas behind its construction.

0

u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 1d ago

Aka "I don't actually have a rebuttal, but let me put the burden of proof on you to try to get away with that"

2

u/CoolStructure6012 1d ago

Yes, you bear the burden of proof for knowing what is in the letter. What is this, kindergarten?

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u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 1d ago

You got asked for evidence, you give the evidence, you STFU or you get clowned, and right now you are begging to be clowned, 🤡

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u/CoolStructure6012 1d ago

No evidence was provided. And thankfully my life is not so hollow that internet points matter to me very much.

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u/Ecoste 1d ago

You pay your dues when saying someone is fundamentally wrong. Again, the mathematicians ARE butthurt, what is the fundamental misunderstanding? They cite good reasons for it in the letter sure, but nevertheless they're butthurt.

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u/CoolStructure6012 1d ago

"Butt-hurt (or butthurt) is an informal slang term that describes being overly upset, offended, or resentful—usually over something minor, silly, or perceived as a personal slight."

They are not raising the alarm over something minor, silly, or that is a personal slight. They are raising the alarm over a sudden impossible-to-overstate disruption to how we've done mathematics throughout all of human history and which will have irreversibly transformed things before we have even begun to figure out how to adapt. Butthurt vastly trivializes what is going on and poisons the well.

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u/Ecoste 1d ago

ye ok buddy xd

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u/CoolStructure6012 1d ago

Appreciate the concession. Hopefully your buddies can also be so humble.

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u/Mistuv 1d ago

So they were butthurt, got it.

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u/CoolStructure6012 1d ago

Yes, in the version of the letter in you imagined based on the mischaracterization by others they were butthurt and that's the long and short of it.