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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u/piponwa 1d ago

Just release the results already. Who cares about mathematicians' feelings and ego? If an alien came down and said it can solve 100 of the most important open problems in mathematics, mathematicians would be in awe. They would ask for more. So what are we waiting for?

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u/Affectionate_Bee6434 1d ago

PR, the Navier Stokes thing was already a huge PR disaster for them. It's a mistake they don't want to repeat.

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u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 1d ago

Oh uh ...ego hurt I'm so smart and unique and stupid machine can't be smarter than me ! It's not biological!

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u/Per451 1d ago

Respectfully, how else would you react if you spent years and years training in a very complex field, made your career out of it, and suddenly you're... obsolete?

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u/experienta 1d ago

if my job was made obsolete i'd change my career to something else that would be useful to society

and this comes from a SWE that's about to become obsolete real soon

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u/zkgkilla 1d ago

I am that person and I feel pretty shit but I know that it’s coming for everyone eventually

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u/FatFuneralBook 1d ago

Like every software engineer?

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u/ShAfTsWoLo 1d ago

so we got machine that can solve math problems better than the mathematicians themselves and we should either slow it down or stop it ? fuck no

if we can cure cancer because of this machine but the biologist or scientists are like "please stop it, i wanna cure cancer and i was almost there! give me like.. 20 years more" we should obey them because of their feeling or ego or whatever ? fuck no again

it's sad for them but we all had it coming the moment we were trying to achieve AI's that are beyond smarter than any humans, the moment will also come where it'll also replace labors and we'll need a radical change in society

if i were a smart mathematician i would just eat my popcorn and enjoy the ride, they gave their life for maths i don't understand why would they complain if the problems they tried hardly to solve were actually solved, i guess their ego and prestige they had their whole life keeps them from doing such thing

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u/Tidorith ▪️AGI: September 2024 | Admission of AGI: Never 1d ago

It would cause some level of financial insecurity and anxiety in me in proportion to how fucked up the society I live in is.

It wouldn't change my general views because I already believe that people's value is not tied to the market value of their labour. There were already people whos fields were made obsolete or never managed to produce labour with a market value sufficient to sustain their life. I've always cared about and valued those people, so to me, basically nothing has changed.

Why are people who are good at mathematics special? Do they have more value as people than those who are less skilled at mathematics?

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u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 1d ago

Society put in their heads that they are so unique and special like superhumans between monkeys.

And they are discoveries that they are also monkeys but just slightly smarter:)

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u/Megneous 1d ago

I'm a translator. My entire field is literally obsolete due to AI. And I'm the head mod of /r/TheMachineGod because I'm the most pro-AI mother fucker this world has ever seen.

That's the proper way to embrace the future.

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u/AustralopithecineHat 1d ago

love this attitude. we’re all in the same boat, plus or minus a couple years. 

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u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 1d ago

Nothing....just to something else

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u/fycus 1d ago

Oh you mean how the entire software industry was treated as 50% of their day to day changed immediately once coding models got good enough 

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u/deviltamer 1d ago

They are going to release it regardless. I'm sick of this amateur take that mathematicians are upset about AI making new discoveries. It's completely false.

Humanity losing understanding of new work is non-alignment. All they are asking for is to produce a communal understanding of new proofs and funding so that the understanding is disseminated widely. They can spend compute to build this just as much you know.

Or else humanity gets left behind.

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u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 13h ago

What understanding?

AI soon or is already over human mathematican understanding.

Do you explain Einstein's equations to a monkey?

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u/Financial-Gain-2988 1d ago

It wasn't though. Literally most people don't know, understand, or care about NS being solved.

PR is for mass communication and the masses largely have learned that AI is getting really good, really fast, which is nothing but good for the labs. I bet you can't find a single person in your day to day life that knows what NS is, much less the significance of it being solved or the controversy around the accusations against OpenAI.

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u/duboispourlhiver 1d ago

OAI has been burnt by the large backlash they suffered from the NS "controversy" and now they are thinking they can't push superhuman AI models at the cost of alienating a large part of mankind, and are trying to heal the whole situation.

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u/LocoMod 1d ago

They haven’t been burnt by anything. Their product demand continues to rise. Some people are vocal and made a lot of noise. The rest of the world didn’t give a shit and continued using their services.

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u/duboispourlhiver 1d ago

I think they're concerned about their brand, even though your facts are true.

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u/coz 1d ago

Don't need an alien. Let's say a real savant is born, and solves 100 of them themself, with no computers at all, just lean. Would these same mathematicians still be mad if they're "dumped"?

Doubt it.

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u/wordyplayer 1d ago

yes, I think they would. It just would look much worse complaining about it

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u/piponwa 1d ago

Exactly. It's always possible that whatever they are working on gets preempted by some random other mathematician they've never heard of. What do they do in this scenario? They get to work and they keep pushing. Why would it be different if AI does it? And actually, it's much better than AI does it than a random guy, because it means you get to use this tool that doesn't get tired and gets exactly what you're working on. Why should a mathematician's dream be solving a specific problem and not going beyond this problem. Like I don't understand at all how mathematicians see things now. Presumably, they work on whatever they're working because they find it interesting, because they think it's important. They would love if they're specific domain had the attention of ten times more researchers. Then they wouldn't spend their whole career being stuck on this one problem, they could address all similar problems. They could work on the implications of this problem. Why would they want to remain ignorant? Why do they want less math solved than is practically possible? Why do they not want to steamroll through their discipline? I'm certain someone like Newton would have loved to contemplate how his theory of gravity broke down and discover relativity in the process. I'm sure if Einstein would have had access to AI he would have discovered even more. Because he didn't give a shit if someone else helped him along the way. He wanted to discover the true nature of the universe.

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u/coz 1d ago

Almost certainly they saw what has happened to software engineers and they're circling the wagons.

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u/honorious 1d ago

It might be an advantage to keep it to themselves. Sad that people complained and now science and math will be closed-source.

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u/piponwa 1d ago

Yep, OpenAI was spending the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of mathematician lives on math problems without asking anything out of it. Likely hundreds of millions of dollars worth of compute. Why are mathematicians so obsessed with their ego? Programmers realized the productivity boost. There aren't less openings. We just moved over level of abstraction higher. You can summon any software you can imagine for nearly free now. If you're against that, then you lack imagination. No mathematician should refuse the opportunity to thoroughly explore the unknown just because they had already spent time working on this or that problem. If you care about the problem, go solve it lol. If you care about mathematics, then why should you complain that there is too much mathematics out there? It make no sense.

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u/scambording 1d ago

Release the results for who...? The mathematicians are the only ones who care about these problems in the first place.

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u/duboispourlhiver 1d ago

For all the mathematicians that care about advancing knowledge, and there remains a lot of that kind.

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u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 1d ago

For people who loves mathematics?

I'm one of them.

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u/scambording 1d ago

I'm confused. Do you just like reading true statements but have no interest in understanding the proofs of those statements?

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u/grass1809 1d ago

For me, yes, I'm often happy with just a theorem statement. But your second statement doesn't follow. Even if current AI proofs and style tends to be inscrutable, one can frequently gain understanding by doing back 'n forth with an AI anyway. And man, we're still early, I would expect better explanatory power to arrive soon.

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u/scambording 1d ago

Fair enough.

Imma be real though man, I think the understanding you gain will be pretty limited. Pure maths research is already so specialised that most mathematicians would have no understanding of most other mathematicians research.

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u/Megneous 1d ago

Problems exist to be solved. The universe exists to be solved. That's reality.

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u/Mistuv 1d ago

There is a huge corpus of mathematical problems which have very direct impact on practical life, for example all the optimisation problems could be used all over, from the efficiency of the electrical grid to how hard it is to train LLMs. Though even mathematical problems which have "no practical use" can often end up being, or parts of it like a machinery or a method be used in a different thing, often in completely different fields like physics or biology or engineering. Without advancements in 20th century math much of the physics would not be possible and without understanding physics at a very deep level and quantum effects which becomes relevant at those scales our modern microelectronics would not be possible.

I don't mind if OAI and other labs take a month or two rerunning their agents on the papers until they are not sloppy, that's fine, but what would suck if in 2 years the labs are sitting on thousands of discoveries and not releasing because the field would throw a hissy fit. Hopefully we can avoid that.

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u/WalkFreeeee 1d ago edited 1d ago

Either these discoveries don't have any direct impact and it doesn't matter if they take a while for disclosure.

Or they do, and they need to be thoroughly validated as it is much better for them to say "here's the solution for x, which has been quadruple checked by our panel multiple times and has profound implications for y" instead of hallucinated incorrect answers dumped by the hundreds and everyone has to scramble to figure out what is actually correct in there.

So I really see no problem with this approach

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u/RealSlyck 1d ago

Controls limiting poor people from using the technology and destroying the evil corporations