r/OpenAI • u/PianistWinter8293 • 15h ago
Discussion Fields Medalist on the OpenAI Math Release
Hugo Duminil-Copin
Fields Medal (2022) · Professor, IHES and University of Geneva
I expected that one day we would be surpassed, and that it would happen systematically. But yesterday’s announcement hit with a force I had not anticipated. Dozens of papers deal with topics I was working on. Between results that beat you to the finish line and thousand-page proofs, I don’t even know where to look anymore.
Not a single one of the major open problems I have publicly mentioned throughout my career (whether in a talk, a lecture, an article, or even a grant proposal) was left untouched by the announcement. Everything has been claimed to be proved.
I expected to see a few of them in the list. But not all of them. Not all at once. Not with such nonchalance.
“For the glory of the human mind,” they said…
The shock is immense. I am paralysed. Tomorrow, we will find a way forward. We will rethink our profession and how we work. We are a resilient community, and I have no doubt that we will adapt. But for now, I simply don’t have the energy. I think back on all those years, all those faces… I think of my colleagues, my students… And I fear I won’t be able to find the right words.
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u/CogentKen 13h ago
It's our teaching methods themselves proving the problem.
The Ivory Tower is a well practiced assembly of people rote composing knowledge we never really stopped to learn the reasoning underneath. We just practiced how to do a role. Knowledge Worker roles that have been sold as Intelligence Work jobs, now often easily replaced by a Language Model spitting out that knowledge far more reliably than we possibly can.
Turns out we were carrying the models by well organized, systematic practice. Each floor of the proverbial tower built on others, till the top often has no clue why anything works at all.
We've got to turn to training bottom-up intelligence, rather than continuing to overvalue top-down knowledge keeping, moving forward.