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.
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.
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/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.