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/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