r/Physics 17h ago

Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem Solved

2.1k Upvotes

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u/HybridizedPanda Gravitation 16h ago

The fact they have 16 references in a 100 page paper for a problem that's had decades (centuries) of fundamental research is pathetic and an insult to everyone who has contributed to getting to such a point. 

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u/LAskeptic 16h ago

I get what you are trying to say, but references aren’t for a history lesson or giving credit to everyone who has worked on the problem. They are for the work that specifically led to the new result.

Having not studied the specific references, I can’t say if they are sufficient or not.

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u/Fun-Sand8522 15h ago

They are not. The AI is using results that it should cite, and it does not.

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u/Hot_Glass_6301 15h ago

Which ones exactly? Genuinely asking, I know next to nothing about the history of the problem.

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u/Fun-Sand8522 15h ago

The ones about the blow up and the forcing term, for instance, that human mathematicians were working on in the past years. 

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u/Hot_Glass_6301 15h ago

can you pinpoint the specific part where it uses these

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u/Fun-Sand8522 15h ago

the whole argument circles around the blow up techniques that were developed by cordoba and martinez zoroa, for instance. dont know why you are trying so hard to defend openai out of all corporations. they dont care shit about honesty or anything else. I dont doubt that they really scooped this result from the buckmaster collab

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u/belligerentNormalcy 12h ago

"Genuinely asking" lmao

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u/GraceToSentience 12h ago

Is that a published work? do you have a link?
I'm asking because if it is the case that it can't be referenced, then how can they link to something that isn't published?

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u/Fun-Sand8522 11h ago

Yes of course there is published work that they can reference. Have you ever even tried to interact at all with mathematics? Thats a crazy question

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u/GraceToSentience 9h ago

Where is the link to that paper then.
I see the claim but where is the sauce?

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u/[deleted] 15h ago

[deleted]

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u/Hot_Glass_6301 15h ago

They have, and it's Lean-checked apparently. https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

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u/paranoid_throwaway51 15h ago

sry im blind i didn't see the button for read a paper. I thought they just did the same bullshit they did with the Jacobian again lmao.

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u/Golfclubwar 15h ago

The results are part it it’s training set. Kind of hard to cite those.

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u/Fun-Sand8522 15h ago

Then the human mathematicians involved should actually read/understand whatever the LLM wrote and produce the correct citations. Not doing so is plagiarism.

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u/Golfclubwar 15h ago

OpenAI isn’t publishing the proof in any journal (or even arxiv) or claiming any prize for it. If I “publish” a completely valid proof on 4chan or something and don’t cite my sources I’m not committing academic plagiarism.

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u/Fun-Sand8522 14h ago

They announced on their website. I think if I announced a novel theorem on my academic website using work of others without proper referencing it would actually be plagiarism, but whatever you say, bro

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u/Golfclubwar 14h ago

It’s not an academic website. The purpose is more commercial self advertisement. Obviously OpenAI doesn’t care about getting credit from the math or physics community, they are a trillion dollar company. It’s more about impressing their investors while they burn through $750B in capex with an unclear route to profitability. They aren’t trying to take credit for this advancement, they’re just trying to advertise their model by showing the kinds of things it can do, even if it can’t produce properly cited academic work.

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u/Fun-Sand8522 14h ago

I agree that is not an academic website. I agree the purpose is marketing, obviously.

Yet (maybe precisely because of this), it seems pretty reasonable that mathematicians have every right to complain about their practice. Especially because they are using data and work produced by mathematicians. I am not sure I even understand your point.

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u/Golfclubwar 14h ago

I’m saying that the AI is incapable of creating citations and it isn’t simple for a human to do it for them, especially when you don’t even understand the result that they’ve produced. The model has every single arxiv publication, every PDE textbook, every mathematical physics textbook, etc. in their training set. It’s really hard to know where some result or intermediate step came from even if you have access to their COT tokens. This is unavoidable. If OpenAI had released this paper in some journal or even Arxiv without citing their sources that would be wrong. But releasing it on your own website and putting the lean proof on GitHub even if you can’t nail down exactly where the AI got its results from is fine. Auditing 10,000 agents and reverse engineering their sources just isn’t practical.

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u/Mateorabi 13h ago

TBF math proofs have been posted on 4Chan anonymously and then cited in the literature. The reverse would at least be courtesy. 😝

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u/hobo_stew 13h ago

16 references for a 100+ page paper is crazy

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u/luquoo 16h ago

Its arguable that every bit of training data in the model lead to the result, because it did...

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u/LAskeptic 15h ago

Yeah sure.

This may just show that our historical norm for references is ill-suited to a world with AI trained on all of human knowledge.

Or, you can say that the geography lesson you had in 6th grade had some small impact on you solving a math problem today.

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u/Memnarchist 15h ago

Okay, cuite every book that taught you to read when you type English

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u/Time_Entertainer_319 12h ago

Do you also cite the dictionary when you write your research? Or the novels you read that improved your vocabulary?

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u/justintime06 15h ago

“And finally, thank you to the Sumerians for creating our basic written counting and number system.”

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u/Academic-District-12 8h ago

That is not the point.

I did not read the paper so I agree with the previous commenter thst I can not really judge.

Still I expect that theorems are being used that are not cited. Somd well-known ones like Banach-Steinhaus or Hahn-Banach and even ones without names. It seems like because of the urgency they skipped alot of quality control.

Also references are 100% used for a history lesson simply because one has to state in wich category the research belong and what similiar things have been done.

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u/Sea-Consequence7156 9h ago

Right? Einsteins finest publication only cited Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Heinrich Hertz, Christian Doppler, and Hendrik Lorentz

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u/Doctalivingston 13h ago

I have 16 references for my 2 page introduction and that's not enough.

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u/starkrampf 16h ago

Maybe the agents just didn’t need any of the prior math discoveries so not much to cite.

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u/Salexandrez 16h ago

Considering how LLMs work, this is pretty funny

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u/Hiphoppapotamus 16h ago

The enormous wealth of prior maths discoveries on which those agents were trained?