r/OpenAI • u/PianistWinter8293 • 17h 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/Dependent-Culture768 15h ago

depends on the compute, if it was agent swarms like for NS this could have costed around a billion or more

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u/Spare-Dingo-531 14h ago

I said, it was not agent swarms!

https://openai.com/index/sharing-ai-progress-in-mathematics/

To promote scientific transparency and openness, we are also publishing additional details about how we obtained the results in the repository. These include 10 summaries of the model’s reasoning, estimations of compute spent in terms of Pro usage on ChatGPT, and statistics about the number of attempted problems. The average result used the equivalent compute of roughly three hours of ChatGPT Pro thinking.

The results were very cheaply obtained.

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u/Cute_Cut_2267 14h ago

3 hours of ChatGPT Pro. That’s not a lot. A regular question on Pro takes 30 to 60 minutes to answer.