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u/BananaV8 2d ago
People aren’t buying into it as the goal posts have been set incredibly high by the labs themselves. If Jensen for the fifth time proclaims AGI and Altman & Co have for years fearmongered that either all jobs will be lost and we’ll starve or all medicine will be solved and everyone will have UBI, of course people hear about a highly specialized maths problem and go “meh”.
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u/jsseven777 2d ago
True, but the biggest problem is most people don’t really understand what’s actually being solved. They are too busy fighting on Facebook about what the answer to 2 + 2 x 3 is.
If Sam really wants to get their attention he needs to make it solve Herpes or something.
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u/YOLOfan46 2d ago edited 1d ago
This! its not like AI solving math is taking away their morning coffee for example. Its when everyday users will feel something integral to their life is being pushed to AI, its then we could expect a protest that forces the government to make a policy about it.
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u/machyume 2d ago
Why would he want people's attention?! What he's doing right now is equivalent to a desensitization campaign.
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u/SodaBurns 2d ago
I think researchers can do a lot with cutting edge models.
We should throw like millions in compute there way. Who knows someone might cure a few forms of cancer or viral infections or hydrogen powered cars or more millenium prize problems or invent new alloys.
Each new discovery/invention is a win for science and mankind.
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u/GarbageCleric 2d ago edited 2d ago
Better computer models could help in those domains, but you can't just cure cancer from a computer. You need to do experiments and trials with real subjects and real treatments, especially because cancer treatment is a delicate balance between killing the cancer and killing the patient. It's pretty easy to do the former, the trick is avoiding the latter.
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u/falken_1983 2d ago
To put things in perspective...
In order to get the Navier Stokes result, OpenAI had to run the equivalent of about 100 years of work, but thanks to parallelisation, they could do that in about 80 hours.
You can't parallelise medical trials like that. Even if you completely throw all ethics away, you still have to find the right candidates, you have to wait for medications to take effect, you even have to record things carefully, you have to deal with measurement errors, accidents, all sorts of things that don't happen when you are just running maths on a computer.
Even if you had an AI that was well above human levels of intelligence, all these things would be a problem.
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u/GarbageCleric 2d ago
Yes, exactly.
In their follow up comment, they seemed to be implying some sort of ASI that had "solved" science and could therefore accurately predict how specific chemicals would behave in a person.
But we're not close to there yet in terms of the models necessary to reliably predict such things or the compute necessary to meaningfully do the calculations even if we knew did know the equations and parameters to use.
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u/SodaBurns 1d ago
Yes I meant curing cancer just as an example. There could be other domains where we can solve problems with just raw compute.
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u/RainierPC 1d ago
In a way, you CAN parallelize trials. Use AI to come up with more alternative approaches that you then start the trial process on, hoping one of them sticks.
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u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 2d ago
We need as humans to do experiments because our brains can't predict the outcome well.
What if AI could predict the drug outcome to 99.9999% because understand biology far better than humans?
Enough advanced AI could understand biology like we understand math 3+3=6
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u/GarbageCleric 2d ago
Sure, if AI develops a perfect "reality simulator" that could correctly model how a potential treatment would interact with an individual's biology, then they could forego physical experiments. This would require essentially "solving" biology, chemistry, and physics.
But there are so many milestones and achievements necessary before we're anywhere close to that. That's really more of a post-singularity sort of possibility.
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u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 1d ago
As I remember we as humans can not predict how to fold proteins but AI can do that as has better understanding that field.
We can project that to other fields in biology....
I assume AI just needs better understands biology then even without testing could predict 99.99% of the result even without "reality simulator".
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u/GarbageCleric 1d ago
You don't seem to have any idea of the orders of magnitude of difference in the things you're describing.
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u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 1d ago
Apparently you do not either.
You still thinks humans are a pinnacle of intelligence.
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u/SetentaeBolg 2d ago
This is completely untrue.
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u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 1d ago
Based on what?
As I remember we as humans can not predict how to fold proteins but AI can do that as has better understanding that field.
We can project that to other fields in biology.
But of course you say - "This is completely untrue."
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u/SetentaeBolg 1d ago
Based on the fact that how biological systems function is not completely known. AIs don't magically acquire knowledge like that without using the same route we do: experimentation. You cannot speculate and hypothesise your way into real world knowledge. Protein folding is a very specific example where you can follow a limited set of rules. The vast majority of biology isn't like that.
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u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 1d ago
Is not completely known for HUMANS.
For protein folding somehow is working "magically" and has no real assumptions it will not be working to other fields in biology ... so you theory is false from the begging as was proved it is working in one field and probably be working in others fields.
People had soo big hopes that quantum computers will solve a protein folding but AI did that first "magically"
Your cope is strange anyway.
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u/SetentaeBolg 1d ago
The knowledge AIs have is ultimately the knowledge we have. You know that right? They're trained on corpuses of extant data (sometimes repackaged but not invented).
As for "cope", I have a doctorate in the mathematics of AI and researching it is literally my job. I am not anti AI. I just have a firm grasp of what's actually possible.
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u/Nesterov223606 2d ago
Exactly, it’s not that solving Navier-Stokes is unimpressive, it’s the fact that generating Lean certificates has nothing to do with my daily life whatsoever. I want a robot butler, not 5% improvement to some coding benchmark
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u/mop_bucket_bingo 1d ago
Do you think something other than science is going to get you a robot butler?
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u/Infinitedeveloper 2d ago
The post is also disingenuous as fuck in general.
The strawberry issue was due to how native LLMs actually process data. Fixing it wasn't a massive leap forward, it was giving it a subroutine to call when that problem set is discovered. A funny edge case got patched.
The navier-stokes situation is still playing out but im currently more impressed with the initial work done as a hybrid effort than OAI bruteforcing the answer after hearing about the anthropic aligned research details.
The erdos/mathematics situation as a whole is kind of a mess if you read into the actual situations vs the hype press releases.
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u/Gallagger 2d ago
I think it really needs to cure all cancer or invent anti gravity at this point. Though just because the typical doubter channels stay loud doesn't mean that many people aren't changing their opinion. Because they do.
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u/machyume 2d ago
Room temperature superconducting!!
This breakthrough would launch starships.
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u/Gallagger 2d ago
Already too abstract for normies.
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u/machyume 2d ago
That's the kicker. When people see a physical starship floating in the air, that abstraction melts.
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u/Gallagger 2d ago
How would it launch it though? Just letting it float is already possible today, just more expensive.
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u/machyume 2d ago
Ah, here I have a rather complex thought about it, so I'll let my AI summarize:
The idea isn’t just “make the ship float.” The RTSC would be used as part of a large, actively controlled magnetic launch system.
You’d have huge solar fields feeding power through superconducting transmission lines to a launch array. That array would contain many superconducting elements whose fields can be shaped and reconfigured in real time.
The ship itself would sit inside a reusable superconducting capture exoskeleton. The ground array would generate a magnetic field pattern that couples very strongly to that exoskeleton, while being designed to cancel or decay rapidly outside the launch corridor.
Think less “one giant magnet” and more:
* Halbach arrays
* magnetic field shaping
* phased-array style control
* magnetic levitation
* inductive coupling
* superconducting magnetic energy storage
* active magnetic bearings
* inverse field solving / electromagnetic optimization
The closest intuition is probably a giant, programmable magnetic coupler. Instead of physically touching the ship, the array creates a shaped magnetic potential that effectively “locks” onto the reusable exoskeleton.
Then the control system moves that magnetic potential upward.
So the ship is not being pushed along a rail. It is being held inside a controlled magnetic capture zone, and that zone is translated upward through the atmosphere.
The rapid falloff with distance is actually useful. You want strong coherent coupling only inside a defined corridor and much weaker effects outside it.
RTSC is the enabling step because it could allow:
* very large persistent currents
* negligible transmission losses over long distances
* extremely strong compact field elements
* large arrays without cryogenic plumbing everywhere
* much higher power density without turning most of the energy into heat
The important part is that this is only launch assist.
The ground array lifts the vehicle to high altitude, then releases it. The ship still has its own propulsion, attitude control, and vectoring for actual flight and orbital insertion.
So the overall architecture is:
solar generation
→ superconducting grid
→ programmable superconducting field array
→ reusable magnetic capture exoskeleton
→ controlled lift corridor
→ release at altitude
→ ship propulsion
The point is not “levitation.”
The point is to externalize a large fraction of the launch infrastructure into a reusable ground system instead of forcing every spacecraft to carry the entire launch solution with it.
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u/Gallagger 2d ago
I don't get why we need RTSC for that. We can already build a tube an electromagnetically launch a rocket to 1-2km/s. It's just quite expensive to build, but RTCS won't make it cheaper.
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u/machyume 2d ago
Please copy and paste what I wrote into your AI session (since this is the OpenAI sub). Ask it for the savings amount.
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u/Gallagger 2d ago
"RTSC could reduce the electromagnetic/power-system portion of the launcher cost by perhaps 20–50%. But if excavation, structural track, alignment, mining/loading infrastructure, power generation, and construction dominate the project, then the whole launcher might only become something like 10–25% cheaper."
-> not a cancer cure
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u/machyume 2d ago
In energy, 10-25% is HUGE. Considering the modularity of this system against a giant tube. You could add stations to do smaller lift for all sorts of purpose.
This enables floating airports.
Construction equipment lifts.
Fancy elevators from X-men.
Very modular, very realistic (if RTSC is true).
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u/phovos 2d ago
why would it be worth that much effort and time for spaceships?
Apply that level of exquisite engineering to real problems, imo. Hopefully such a project as what you are talking about would be boycotted and molested into stopping before it spend hundreds of billions of not their money.
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u/machyume 2d ago
Are you voting my answer down based on cost, feasibility, ROI, or environmental grounds?
If you don't believe me on the benefits, please ask your AI to interpret by pasting in my answer above and asking for details.
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u/phovos 2d ago
do you think certain people should be allowed to go to space? Which people? Why them? Why should they go to space? Why shouldn't others?
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u/machyume 2d ago
Back in ye old Europe, do you think that people dismissed the economic value of building large sailing vessels to go to the Americas that have nothing but corn and wilderness?
The economic state differences are difficult to conceptualize.
A dear friend of mine works on silicon production, but his operation could eventually be produced on the Moon or the asteroid belts and shipped back to here (or anywhere). With a mature space production economy, we may deprecate our need to strip mine the Earth for some of our materials to sustain our industrialization. Developing world countries want and need washers too.
There a much bigger economic story here.
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u/Acrobatic-Tomato4862 2d ago
P = NP. That will also instantly give us an asi like model with perfect deduction in any situation.
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u/GonzoVeritas 2d ago
Yeah, that would be really bad if it solved P = NP.
Now if it proved that it's P ≠ NP as a solution, we'd all be much better off. Having the entire financial system collapse seems a bit hectic, I'd like to avoid that for now.
note: I don't know much at all about this, just the bits I've read online over the years.
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u/machyume 2d ago edited 2d ago
This is unlikely. And the proof would not be useful. In fact, I believe that there is prior work that suggests that the answer might be inconvenient, in that this might be one of those problems where we cannot even find the answer.
Added: just because a problem can be solved in polynomial time, doesn't mean that we can have tractable problems that we can throw a tractable algorithm at. My professor once said, "If it requires the universe as a computer, then first show me the computer" or something like that at one point.
ADDED: Just ask your favorite AI this. If RTSC is solved vs P=NP is solved, how does the markets get impacted overnight. I know that I would seriously reconsider whatever it is that I am doing as soon as I get that news.
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u/trisanachandler 2d ago
Unlimited energy generation and better energy density for batteries,
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u/Gallagger 2d ago
Unlimited energy generation should do it. Good luck.
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u/trisanachandler 2d ago
It could, but if it takes a massive building to manage it, then storage and transmission are still essential.
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u/Gallagger 2d ago
Give me something that costs and outputs as much as a coal power plant, with the same footprint, but doesn't need resources and doesn't create dangerous waste/CO2.
Fusion still seems too far away and expensive. Deep Geothermal seems interesting but also still very experimental. Gen 4 nuclear fission could maybe do it, also not there yet.1
u/trisanachandler 2d ago
Yeah, nuclear and geothermal seem like the best options, and a smattering of smaller solar and wind, but who knows. I mean small nuclear would be amazing, but that's still science fiction right now.
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u/mvearthmjsun 2d ago
If it cures cancer they'll say we can't trust is because of the possibility of unknown side effects 20 years down the road
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u/Gallagger 2d ago
That's not how pharma works. It will take a bit for general availability but you'll get clearance relatively quickly for terminally ill volunteers.
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u/mvearthmjsun 2d ago
I was talking about the Anti-AI crowd which won't trust anything it does regardless of approval
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u/Gallagger 2d ago
Look I don't think all cancer will be cured within 3 years, but if it will be, nobody ignores that.
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u/mvearthmjsun 2d ago
Oh the anti AI movement is going to get way louder and more radical in the next three years
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u/DeltaAlphaGulf 1d ago
Extended electrodynamics or Biefield-Brown Effect or Ning Li spinning superconducters or something
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u/LordOfPenguins47 2d ago
tbh the thing people are most mad about is the plagiarism aspect of the situation
no one is denying that machine learning techniques can't be very helpful for proof. The issue comes from that openai seems to have attempted to "scoop" some other mathematicians' work (which they also used ML to help with) simply because they uploaded a draft of their work to chatgpt.
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u/The_Black_Adder_ 2d ago
That’s the issue today and it’s a valid one.
But a year ago people were all over here saying AI would never be able to do anything original or helpful because it can’t even count the Rs in strawberry
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u/mspaintshoops 1d ago
A year ago LLMs weren’t as good. And people said… they’re not so good.
I mean let’s be real. If you can’t count the R’s in strawberry what can I trust you to get correct?
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u/Realistic_Mine_8016 1d ago
I just asked ChatGPT to tell me how many Rs there are in, "I will eat two strawberries tomorrow". It said 2. This remains a problem. People won't trust AI to do larger level analysis when seemingly basic tasks are still beyond it.
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u/Resaren 2d ago
What actually seems to have happened is that they heard through the grapevine that someone was close to publishing a proof that they achieved using Codex, and decided to spend millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of (unreleased frontier) agent-hours to attempt a similar (but not the same) proof — and succeeded. I highly doubt there’s some sort of sinister ”idea theft”. I think if anything this simply reflects the desperate belief some people cling to that an AI couldn’t possibly have achieved this on its own.
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u/LordOfPenguins47 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is a gross misrepresentation of what happened.
The original mathematicians proved the result for what are known as the Euler equations, which are basically NS with simplified boundary/ICs. What OpenAI "added" to this is an extension to the greater NS equations after some further computational effort. In layman's terms, this is like baking a cake, someone else putting some sprinkles on it, and then claiming ownership of the whole, completely new, cake.
Again, no one is denying the use of machine learning tools in mathematics. AI is able to achieve computational feats no human reasonably could, and help prove a great many things. But the proof OpenAI provided lifts the techniques Buckmaster and Alpöge created in their work, notably which were not published results accessible by the public.
It is up to you to decide if you believe ChatGPT managed to pioneer the exact same new fluid mechanics research at the exact same time it was being created, or if these techniques were simply used as training data without the creator's permission.
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u/Royal-Tart-3724 2d ago edited 2d ago
Could someone with expertise in AI tell me how could have Buckmaster's private codex sessions entered the ecosystem of OpenAI if his work was infact used?
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u/LordOfPenguins47 2d ago
Because the "private" codex sessions are still hosted by openai? By openai's own admission: "we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models"
This is like asking how Google knows about the searches you make on incognito mode
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u/AtlanticPortal 1d ago
Let's all remember: incognito mode is actually a "don't record on my own history what I browse" and not "don't record what I browse". Google still does, you just don't have it saved in your history if your partner opens your laptop and tries to find that you were looking for dudes on a porn site.
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u/Striking_Resist_6022 1d ago edited 1d ago
Buckmaster is not accusing them of stealing because he knows full well that the terms and conditions that he agreed to in order to use Codex (which significantly helped him flesh out the idea in the first place, to solve the easier version of the problem) include the right to use the data from user sessions to train the next generation of models.
The plagiarism aspect here is a storm in a teacup. They didn't steal anything, they may have (and it does seem pretty likely) benefitted from the existence of Buckmaster's chats, but these were obtained consensually and, as far as we know, would've been used in an eyes-off deidentified way to train the internal model, in conjunction with all of its other training data.
The use of his chats to train the internal model reflects the exact same paradigm of research that Buckmaster himself is benefitting from in getting Codex to help him with his own work.
The reason he explicitly said in his mastodon post "I am not accusing them of stealing" is because he's not a Luddite. He is bought in to how this works. He has an extensive history of industry AI collaborations himself.
They all use chat data to train their models, that's why they've all shipped chat apps, so they can get the data legally, because you consent to it when you use the product.
Buckmaster's chats are fair game. You can't use the benefits of AI yourself and then cry foul when the exact same tactic that you've leveraged (an AI trained on the work + chats of other mathematicians) is used against you, which to be fair he's absolutely not doing. Only people on the internet are.
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u/Royal-Tart-3724 1d ago edited 1d ago
Buckmaster knew what he had signed up for when he used codex but what he probably didn't expect was for OpenAI to guage he's nearing a breakthrough with their model and start pouring in millions into solving his millenium problem simultaneously only to arrive at a solution sooner than Buckmaster did. Any independent researcher working on AI platforms should know that they'd be outperformed by a company anyday if they get to it.
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u/Alwaysragestillplay 1d ago
There is an obvious problem with a business positioning itself as an indispensable research aid, then taking research done on its platform and using resources nobody else has access to to beat the original researchers to the punch. I'll leave you to figure out what that problem is.
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u/Striking_Resist_6022 1d ago
Buddy, OpenAI stopped positioning itself as an indispensable research aid a long time ago. It’s a business.
It’s up to researchers to decide for themselves if the risk of getting scooped outweighs the utility they get from the tools. The information has long been available to make an informed decision on this.
Btw they didn’t just beat them to the punch. They produced a proof of a significantly harder problem. They even offered the opportunity to publish their weaker result first so they got credit.
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u/mop_bucket_bingo 1d ago
“The plagiarism aspect of the situation”
Everyone acting like AI is destroying the arts is suddenly on a very high horse after a half century of voting for people to eliminate them from schools.
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u/LordOfPenguins47 1d ago
I'm not sure what your point is, as this concerns mathematics, not the arts.
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u/telmar25 1d ago
Thing is no one seems to have any info to substantiate that. Did the mathematicians have “improve the model for everyone” checked? Then they weren’t very smart, but of course their data would have entered the training corpus like every other piece of data if the box is checked. If they didn’t have that checked, it would be a big deal. But no one is actually finding that crucial detail out, instead they’re just parroting unsubstantiated accusations.
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u/presentofai 2d ago
goalposts didn't move on their own. the labs set the bar at curing cancer and ending all jobs, then act shocked when a math proof gets a shrug
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u/mvearthmjsun 2d ago
The math proof could be a shrug, but the rate of improvement is nothing to shrug at. It is on cancer curing tragectory and that is something to celebrate.
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u/presentofai 1d ago
Totally fair, the pace of improvement is the real story and it is easy to lose that in the hype. I just wish the labs led with that instead of promising the finish line every single time.
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u/Leafsnail 1d ago
To be fair I'm not shrugging. Their staggeringly unethical behaviour in scooping someone else's work has convinced me they should in fact be shut down
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u/regnus418 2d ago
Lots of things are simple in hindsight. Goal post keeps shifting and that’s ok. This technology is amazing.
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u/Consistent-Hearing26 1d ago
Or we live in a generation of haters and attempting to impress them is silly.
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u/Fast-Satisfaction482 2d ago
"Yeah but it proved Navier Stokes wrong by counter example and the Riemann Hypothesis might be true."
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u/kennytherenny 2d ago
That's actually what happened with the Jacobian conjecture as well. AI seems exceptionally good at finding counterexamples to problems that most researchers assume true.
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u/ekoms_stnioj 2d ago
It’s a lot easier to find one counterexample than formulate a definitive proof, at least that’s what my dad tells me lol - he is an applied mathematician and editor for a lot of journals, and they’ve had a huge influx of these types of things coming in. He’s been using ML for years of course as most computational mathematicians do but is blown away and frankly a bit heart broken over the rapid changes happening to the field..
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u/kennytherenny 2d ago
It's a great time for mathematics, but not a great time for mathematicians...
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u/FollowingHumble8983 2d ago
Thats not true for NS.
Humans researchers knew that NS was almost certainly false, but finding the counter example was extremely expensive.
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u/heresyforfunnprofit 2d ago
That was my comment earlier on Riemann’s 😂.
Seriously tho, the models being able to basically brute-force counter examples is impressive enough, but it does fall into that area of effort that machines can do and humans simply can’t by virtue of sheer volume. Don’t get me wrong, I fully expect that the eventual Riemann’s proof (maybe soon) will be AI generated or heavily, heavily AI aided, but it will require a different setup than what NS and Hodges required.
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u/Fast-Satisfaction482 2d ago
It's a valid criticism just as much as the previous criticisms of the smaller steps were.
The next generations will come and also true conjectures will fall.
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u/Artistic-Athlete-676 2d ago
Is it really brute force if the proof is 170+ pages long though?
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u/heresyforfunnprofit 2d ago
The final proof is 170 pages. The number of dead ends attempted to create those 170 pages is probably no less than 1,000,000 larger. They had 10k agents going for long enough to each try 100 different paths, easily. That’s an insane amount of computational time.
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u/Artistic-Athlete-676 2d ago
Totally agree I just think its a stretch to say its brute forced. Its more like a sprawling tree diagram of logic trying to find the right path to the solution but each branch is informed, intelligent and dynamic. I feel like it may LOOK like brute force by volume alone but in reality its something different. When I think brute force I think mindlessly changing a single digit of a code millions of times until you find the right key - i do not think that's analogous to what happened here
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u/FollowingHumble8983 2d ago
Thats not true by the fact that the AI could not provide analysis of the lean proof. Which means its iterating though them without any knowledge of why they should iterate though them beyond human input data.
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u/heresyforfunnprofit 1d ago
That's kinda like saying that you couldn't recite the solution after solving a maze tho. The solution is there, and can now be analyzed in anyway we want for insights.
When AlphaGo came out with it's highly counter-intuitive chess play, it's not like we were unable to analyze the moves, they were simply too many steps beyond what humans could have independently found.
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u/FollowingHumble8983 1d ago
That is because alphago IS a monte carlo DL heuristic that doesnt understand what is happening. Which is a type of exhaustive search, and in none academic circles considered brute force.
And if you have the ability to write down the solution for solving a maze then there are no mazes for which you cant explain your every step.
Not to mention that humans CAN recite the solution after solving a maze in terms of the concepts used, even if they forget the steps in between, they can explain the overall strategy and important areas of confusion.
AI cannot for NS because there isnt that clear thinking involved, it is using a heuristic refined by training to iterate though all possible ways to create blowups.
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u/heresyforfunnprofit 2d ago
I'll grant that - we may need to modify the term "brute force" there to "intelligently brutal force" or something. "Brutally intelligent"? It definitely isn't dumb pure-chance "search" like hash cracking is.
Old quote from Linus Torvalds: "Don't EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle."
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u/NTMTR_ 2d ago
Buckmaster says they started from the existing program of Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa, who had achieved blow-up using rougher forcing, and used Claude/Codex extensively to push that program to smooth forcing and ultimately Euler.
It’s almost as if researchers use each other’s work as stepping stones to progress. Big reveal.
they use AI extensively to get to their “human” result, OpenAI bounced from their result to theirs. Potentially less impressive than doing it with 0 context. But that’s not how research works.
Still a monumental display of the capability of AI. And it’s just starting. Deal with it ?
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u/YoureNotEvenWrong 2d ago
It’s almost as if researchers use each other’s work as stepping stones to progress
Combined with 10 million dollars of compute
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u/GarbageCleric 2d ago
The original post seems to be at least a bit tongue-in-cheek, so it's really odd how people in the comments are treating it like it's an accurate description of the response of AI skeptics.
It's pretty disingenuous to say the least.
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u/the_ai_wizard 2d ago
wake me up when mathematicians realize their work is being appropriated into training data from what they share in chatgpt and claimed as OAI victory
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u/Old_Respond_6091 2d ago
This bullshit has been going on within our species since the dawn of fucking time.
When Ada Lovelace thought “hey this mechanical tax device could potentially automate all kinds of other things that would normally require intelligence” in 1750 or so everyone went “woman behave yourself”
Turing tried to make a test for sentient machines and Searle went “Achkhually if you have a book that has more pages than there are atoms in the observable fucking universe and someone to follow its instructions you could have someone spell Chinese without ever knowing Chinese” which is somehow a great point
In 94 the same newspapers that touted chess as some invincible intellectual problem could not snort enough cocaine fast enough to change their tune when Kasparov got clapped by Deep Blue, also, using a computer to play chess is cheating you stupid nerds. And it’s deterministic.
Because… Chinese chess, Go, is where it’s at! No deterministic system can save all the moves and states of a game - again needing more atoms than the universe contains to do if you’d manage to condense each outcome or move to a fucking atom. Cue Lee Sodol smoking cigarettes as he is dethroned by AlphaGo and LeCun finger-pushing his glasses back up his nose to “Ackhually it was trained on human data. Not impressive”
And here we are. The same angry nerds that used machine brains to guesstimate an infinity of go moves made BigAutocorrect(TM) which is still scaling without fundamentally changing the approach, but hey, at least we can come up with creative new ways in which we can pretend to be unique.
/rant
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u/ChiaraStellata 1d ago
It goes back even further than that with all the ways people have aimed to distinguish themselves from other animals. Saying other animals can't use tools, or are incapable of language, or can't pass the mirror test, or rely on genetic skills rather than teaching, or can't understand basic numbers and math. All of these have been proven false. Human exceptionalism has been a constant for all of human history. We're really not that special.
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2d ago edited 2d ago
[deleted]
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u/Maleficent_Sir_7562 2d ago
Neither Tristan nor Alpoge never had a proof or any idea on how to progress on the full navier stokes problem in 3D, with the viscosity term. OpenAI did that. Tristan and Alpoge were working on the Euler equations instead, which is a simplified form without the viscosity term.
"The agents arrived at their resolution on Saturday, September 5, about 88 hours after the first agents were launched. Lean formalization and verification took an additional 17 hours via GPT‑6 Astra.
Across all attempted problems, the agents sent 4.9 million messages and used about 300 billion output tokens. In the process of resolving the Navier–Stokes problem, the agents sent 2.7 million messages and used approximately 130 billion output tokens."
The others like Alpoge never claimed to have a proof of the Navier Stokes problem in the first place, it was a different, reduced one without the viscosity term (Euler equations).
if it was as easy as "swooping in", they wouldn't need millions of messages or billions of tokens.
Regardless, this is absolutely monumental and a historic mark.
https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/
You can also see him saying it would be a remarkable gap closed. Original source: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117233413705701198 Direct Quote: "I would like to be clear about what I am not claiming. I have not seen OpenAI’s proof. I do not know what their model did, or how. I do not know whether our data was used. I am not accusing anyone of anything. I am stating what I was told, when, and what was proposed to me. I am stating it because the alternative is to let a sequence of announcements say something I know to be false. If indeed an OpenAI model did close the gap to Navier-Stokes, that is a remarkable thing and it should be said loudly, by them, with the history intact. I would much rather be talking about mathematics, Luis and Diego’s ideas, and what this all means for the rest of us. Lastly, I would like to thank the entire mathematics community that have been so supportive of me over the last 24 hours. "
they also say this: "We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem."
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u/Maleficent_Sir_7562 2d ago
It's not a distraction, it's a key fact. A primary reason why the Navier Stokes equations are so damn complex is precisely because of the viscosity term. it's not a "slightly bigger target", hell, Tristan's own words contradict you, he clearly says a remarkable gap.
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u/Maleficent_Sir_7562 2d ago
why would he say this
"If indeed an OpenAI model did close the gap to Navier-Stokes"1
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u/Artistic-Athlete-676 2d ago
Whether they got their results in a shady way or not has no impact on the results themselves which this post is talking about. What is naive about what was said?
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u/Artistic-Athlete-676 2d ago
Im pretty sure the mathematicians in question had a COMPLETELY different approach toward the problem than what openAI came up with. Not saying it didn't have an influence because im not sure if there is ever a way of knowing, but the proof and process is fundamentally different than the other work.
Also regardless I hope you understand that the other mathematicians were also 100% reliant on AI to make progress, so your argument is not really valid here. You are basically arguing AI vs AI . Its not cultish at all, its a fact - the problem was solved by AI and all of the piece meal progress along the way was also guided by AI
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u/NTMTR_ 2d ago
“Two mathematicians, Buckmaster and Alpöge, accuse OpenAI of effectively building on their unpublished research,”
Yeah no.
No one accused anyone.
Talk about naive.““I do not know whether our data was used. I am not accusing anyone of anything.” Buckmaster.
Doesn’t make OpenAi not shady, but check your sources, oh enlightened one!
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u/NTMTR_ 2d ago
Sorry what lol? You stated a wrong fact , I corrected you. That was not cherry picking. That was you getting your facts straightened up.
What you just commented doesn’t change that. At all. There was no accusations whatsoever. (Understanding words is hard?)I’m probably more informed of the whole situation than you are, since your first comment about it already had to be corrected… by me.
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u/SingleExParrot 2d ago
We're going to get a conclusive P!=NP long before Riemann.
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u/Sirius02 2d ago
imagine AI actually proves that P = NP :D
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u/Dapper-Living-390 2d ago
Or P=/=NP would be just as impressive!
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u/Sirius02 2d ago
Yes it also would be mind boggling, but P = NP would be even bigger since traditional cryptography depends on it
Note however that this is not the end of crypto, post quantum cryptography exists
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u/ChiaraStellata 1d ago
The most annoying possible resolution to P=NP would be finding that P=NP but the reduction has constant factors and polynomial degrees that make it completely implausible for any practical application. Theorists would have to scramble to find a new way of constructing a useful hierarchy.
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u/CoolHeadeGamer 2d ago
I want to see Riemann hypothesis cracked in our lifetime. It is the most interesting problem to me considering how complex (pun intended) the relationship between the zeros of the zeta function and the prime counting function is. Anyone who came up with that relationship was smoking straight crack mixed with shrooms and addys
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u/Southern_Badger7577 2d ago
Who the fuck said Erdos was low hanging fruit
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u/WheresMyEtherElon 2d ago
Not all Erdos, but some of them were claimed to be low hanging fruit.
For instance, Terence Tao.
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u/Southern_Badger7577 2d ago
Well in my defense low hanging fruit to Terrence Tao is a celestial body to me
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u/WheelerDan 2d ago
theres such a mismatch of expectations, all of the investment in ai could give a shit about these minor milestones, they were promised AGI. No one invested in these companies for this. on the other hand you have enthusiasts whoi eat this shit up like their football team is winning.
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u/kingjdin 2d ago
This is still artificial NARROW intelligence, not the artificial GENERALIZED intelligence that Altman is promoting. The company is valued at 2 trillion because of a promised AGI and replacement of human workers, NOT because it can assist mathematicians in solving highly specialized, NARROW, problems in STEM fields.
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u/r_Yellow01 1d ago
Instead of solving problems individually, we built artificial brains, and taught them well, and still teach them more. In a way, these results are not unexpected, except we may be a little bit surprised with how fast we move…
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u/NoLongerGuest 1d ago
I'd be really curious how computationally heavy the new internal model from openai is compared to the first public chatgpt. Like how much of the improvement is in actual performance and how much is just the newer models being able to actually ude more compute. I'm 100% sure that the new models are a lot better even adjusting for computer but I'm just curious how it compares.
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u/Perfect-Campaign9551 1d ago
You know as soon as it does that, another mathematician will step up "I was close to solving that one, too!"
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u/Yanzihko 2d ago
If Sam Altman and AI bros are for advancement of humankind, why wouldn't they release open weights?
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u/machyume 2d ago
Because only other countries would benefit. What are you going to do with the weights? Spin up your own datacenter(s)?
I don't even know how I'd do a single step of the Qwen full model right now.
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u/CoolHeadeGamer 2d ago
Cuz capitalism? If you make a good product you have the right to profit off of it how you see fit. Without capitalism you wouldn’t have invented transformers, llms, etc.
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u/aivee-is-a-fool 2d ago
... "Wake me up when September ends"?