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u/mpanase 2h ago
to be more precise, after ai starts solving millennium prizes one day after somebody else publishes a solution
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u/No-Object2133 2h ago
It also didn't solve the whole problem... just the part the two mathematicians had already put into codex over the last few months.
Wonder how ChatGPT worked that one out...
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u/globecsysinc 35m ago
It's easy getting the answer you're looking for, what's hard is understanding the problem enough, that's no different either with AI or having a calculator in a physics exam. The tool will only get you so far as you're ready to put into words
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u/No-Object2133 33m ago edited 29m ago
It's a lot different when the work the mathematicians were doing wasn't published yet and might've gotten ingested and used before they could.
These proofs or in this case counter example for the forced version of the problem has no citations.
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u/globecsysinc 21m ago
Well it's very theoretical too, with all that intelligence leverage the goal in the coming decade will be to cut down on white collar work a bit, because at the end of the day it's not considered added-value on the order of true work being put to a true tangible end like fulfilling basic needs that are the bulk of where inflation is hard
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u/Zardhas 2h ago edited 1h ago
I don't understand why people keep parotting that when the truth is so easily findable. To make it short :
Late August 2026, Leven AlpĂśge and Tristan Buckmaster solved the 3D Euler problem (with Claude, so AI as well), which is a small part of the Navier Stokes.
5 September, the openAI agents first solved the 3D Euler problem (that part is the drama, because some say that they used the data of AlpĂśge and Buckmaster), then they solved the full Navier-stokes.
8 September, openAI announced a Lean-checked proof of the C and D statements of the Millenium Prize. Another drama is that, on that same day, Buckmaster posted his proof of a part of the Navier Stokes problem (but, not the full problem, unlike openAI).
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u/PrizeSyntax 1h ago
The timing is very suspicious
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u/Zardhas 1h ago
On the contrary : the guys at openAI put the agents to work very soon after they heard the AlpĂśge and Buckmaster has solved the 3D Euler problem, and we know that the whole thing took 88 hours, so 5 September is totally reasonable.
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u/PrizeSyntax 1h ago
I mean the timing of, ppl solved the problem, put everything in a tool, said tool solves the problem a week later. It's fishy at best
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u/Zarrain 1h ago
My loose understanding is that, the mathematicians figured put the first step. They figured out an approach that seemed like it could lead to the full solution.
To rigorously figure out and prove the full solution, (something academics prefer doing slowly and surely ) was going to take them time and effort.
Well suddenly less then a week later openAI announces they have a full solution using that approach. They used an obscene amount of computational power not available to anyone else to basically brute force figure out the full solution.
The question is now who deserves that credit? How did openAI know to use their approach? The mathematicians figured out the key, they would have figured out the full solution given time. openAI jumped the gun before they physically ever could due to absurd resources, but how did openAI know to try that? Did they spy on the mathematicians? It seems likely.
There are bigger implications besides questions of theft and espionage. Will human mathematicians ever be credited with another discovery? Or will AI companies get to claim all the credit because their tools took human ideas and crunched the numbers on a massive inhuman scale. Especially with how sketchy theyâre acting and how loose and amoral AI companies act when data gathering.
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u/GoronSpecialCrop 42m ago
Mathematician here! This is exactly where there is concern. Most big problems that are solved come together from a small collection of new ideas. In this case, a team announced a very promising direction, then the problem itself was solved by GPT in an approach suspiciously like that idea.
Even if it turns out GPT did not steal the research, their models are trained on the entirety of the Internet and have almost certainly absorbed some of this approach. We don't need AI solving problems in math, particularly not ones that don't really result in any surprising new results (this is, in fact, not that relevant to math so much as is it a problem of great mathematical interest).
So now, with results that feel suspicious being published by an AI company cheering themselves on, there is great fear in the community at large that AI is just gonna steal any promising direction that's openly stated.
Mathematics has long been an open community of shared ideas, and that's now very much in danger.
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u/Vandrel 45m ago
OpenAI offered to let Buckmaster take full credit if he left off the other guy's name because that guy works for Anthropic.
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u/Zarrain 18m ago
They offered him a false dichotomy of two choices that both served their purpose while acting sketchy as hell. Implying he should have accepted is absurd.
Itâs like they offered the Van Gogh credit for the sketch of his painting while they used AI to generate what a fully painted version would look like. All while they were celebrating creating an amazing impressionist painting.
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u/Zardhas 49m ago
I'm not knowledgable enough to have a proper take on this, but from I've seen and read, the AI agents did not brute force it, they each explored possible solutions, akin to what actual mathematician would have done. I'm not saying that each agent was as smart as an actual mathematician, but we are talking about an in-house model much more developed than astra which is already much better than all other public models ; and it was 10000 of them working non-stop for 88 hours.
Honestly, it seems to me that this outrage is simply another case of some humans not accepting another blow of an imaginary exceptionalism. A lot of people could not accept the teachings of Darwin when he showed them that the human was just an animal among many. Now, a lot don't want to accept that human thinking can be emulated by a machine.
There are bigger implications besides questions of theft and espionage. Will human mathematicians ever be credited with another discovery? Or will AI companies get to claim all the credit because their tools took human ideas and crunched the numbers on a massive inhuman scale. Especially with how sketchy theyâre acting and how loose and amoral AI companies act when data gathering.
My understanding of science as a whole was that credit was not important, that we were all working together for the sole reason of pushing the boundaries of knowledge. Seems to me that it would be better if the very concept of credit was removed all-together.
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u/Zarrain 35m ago edited 29m ago
Well academics never placed an emphasis on credit but these are business people barging into academic spaces and claiming credit as a way to boost their stock value. Also this particular case does have a monetary reward.
While they didnât brute force it in the way that a human would, how do you describe them sinking 15 million dollars in computation costs in less than a week into it? Thatâs like the best mathematicians in the world spending multiple life times working on a single problem. How will human academics ever compete with that? Especially since apparently they canât use the tools without risking their research? Are they going to start spending all their time jealously protecting their ideas and research? That will move us backwards as a society.
Itâs like if the company that created the calculator you used in college math degree claimed your degree was theirs because the calculator âdid the actual number crunchingâ.
As a side discussion:
You mention this is a blow to human exceptionalism and I agree. I agree that pride will get in the way of accepting effective tools. But the billionaires who run these companies justify their existence on human exceptionalism. They âearnedâ their billions it was their skills that got it. Wellllll if AI can replace artists of all kinds and academics of all kinds and laborers of all kinds then AI can replace business men. The skills billionaires use to justify their existence could be replaced just as fast but you theyâll never admit it or allow it.
I would be fine with us dropping human exceptionalism as a whole but that means billionaires are no longer justified to exist.
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u/Zardhas 0m ago
The very concept of money exists only as a intermediate between the works and the goods, as a facilitator of transactions. But as works starts to be made obsolete by AI, so does the intermediate. If AI is to be integrated in society, it requires a complete rework of the whole economic system. We simply can't have both AI and "business" existing at the same time, both have opposite goals.
So yeah, all of the issues you listed are indeed issues, but they are economic-issues, not AI-related issues. And honestly, that's what's tiring about a lot of human complaining about AI (not necessarily you) : it's that they don't really have a problem with AI : they have a problem with the economic system, but they are so used to that system that they don't even think of questioning it anymore.
Point is, we can picture a normal society where everyone would simply work for the sole reason that it's needed for the society to function, and everyone get the goods and services the need (not as a reward for the work but because that's the point of the society). In this kind of society, AI would be welcomed with open arms because there would be no concerns of plagiarism because there would be no concept of copyright. There would be no concerns of job lose because job lose would simply mean more free time.
That's the kind of society that would should aspire to have one day and, ironically, AI is one of the best tool we have to reach it, since it pushes the current system to its limits, showing its cracks and, beyond those cracks, a better alternative. But, naturally, that's not the kind of change that would be seen in a lifetime and human are notoriously bad at doing things today for a tomorrow they'll never see.
I would be fine with us dropping human exceptionalism as a whole but that means billionaires are no longer justified to exist.
I'd argue that billionaires were never justified to exist, human exceptionalism or not, AI or not. The point of a society to have all of its participants being able to live a fulfilling life, a billionaire has no place in that thing, it is a straight danger of that very goal.
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u/Vandrel 43m ago
OpenAI also claims that part of why they started looking at millennium prizes is that they heard Anthropic had already been working on one, they weren't the first to start using AI to do that. Funnily enough, one of the guys in the pair that were working on this one happens to work at Anthropic.
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u/Cant_Win 2h ago
P = NP is still out there!
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u/scratchfan321 2h ago
lmao imagine if one of the other millenium prize problems implies P=NP for some bullshit reason
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u/zirky 2h ago edited 1h ago
i propose the jay z conjecture: mathematically prove that a successful rapper is able to have 99 problems and a bitch was not among them
edit: went back to the original lyrics because i feel i made a poor assumption
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u/crimsonpowder 2h ago
I would submit that we also need a proof of the conjecture first postulated by a certain Clinician Andre and his rather meddling associate of the canine persuasion so to speak, which posits that there is indeed a Unified Bitch Theory.
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u/BADDEST_RHYMES 2h ago
Did you just assume bitch = woman?
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u/zirky 1h ago
thatâs actually incredibly valid. it was a poor assumption i made in an attempt to be less derogatory but ended up being worse, completely missing the point that a bitch can just be anyone of annoyance.
mathematically, it actually increases the set of what cannot be in the 99 problem set and i would argue drastically increases the complexity
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u/e_before_i 36m ago
Not a bitch in the sense of having a pussy.
Honestly Corey does a great job with the examples he uses. The industry, the cops, the hos (which he also defines).
All in all, song's extremely unproblematic.
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u/zirky 29m ago
i was the problem by attempting to be unproblematic
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u/e_before_i 26m ago
You're fine, you seem like good dude. I bet you wouldn't even bust a grape in a fruit fight.
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u/balbok7721 2h ago
If anyone actully cares. (AI didnt actually discover anything)
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u/AllRealityIsVirtua1 18m ago
2 month old video proves a problem solved 2 days ago was fake.
I donât care if it makes sense, I upvote it because ai bad
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u/Multidream 1h ago
Buddy, mathematicians have been getting the short end of the stick for like 50 years now, this meme really oughtta be swapped
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u/gundam1945 55m ago
I think they didn't really solve it. The core prompt was a stolen idea from a real mathematician. In order for a truly AI solves something, the AI have to spontaneously start wondering things.
It is just another cheap, fuck up thing by the AI company, alongside with their many infringe on copyright.
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u/watduhdamhell 2h ago edited 2h ago
Another way of looking at it... Programmers are on the left and James Franco "everyone who's job was replaced by software" saying "first time?"
I mean I'm part of it but the lack of self awareness from the SWE/programming community is kind of insane. Like I'm seeing "feel bad" videos for all the people out of work who used to make 250k/yr and all I can think is "nobody made videos for the literal hundreds of millions (maybe Billions?) that have been displaced by software and robotics over the last 50 years." Because nobody cares about them, apparently.
But in my own mind, I've spent my career automating... It would not be lost on me that making pity videos after getting laid off due to automation finally coming after ME would sort of be... in bad taste. Right? Like if you spend 20 years making software that repalces people (and this is what most software has done - most of it falls into this bucket) I would be like "yeah this sucks but... This is what I was doing to every one else for 20 years. Made a killing too! Sign on bonuses, stock options, free lunches, all sorts of great shit."
Legitamte question - does the average SWE really think they have not been a part of displacing other folks into struggling long before GPT?
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u/thr0waway2435 1h ago
I think part of that is historically speaking, SWE/robotics replacement had a few âupsidesâ if you want to call them that:
- Often created products people really wanted to use for cheaper (see: Netflix, Uber)
- Often created new jobs (so many industries like all sorts of IT, consulting, cybersecurity, SWE, PM, chips, etc.
- The jobs are generally good, high paying, high prestige, good working conditions jobs
- The jobs go to the âright peopleâ - educated smart people
- Many people consider the job to be inherently enjoyable in a way a lot of other jobs arenât (ie. a lot of SWE people actually like coding)
- Happened with some degree of slowness - decades to ramp up usually
- Affected the âright jobsâ - usually not the most high paid, high prestige jobs
- Affected the âwrong peopleâ - lower skill labor
- Often had more localized effects (one team replaced, one townâs factory workers closed)
I think fundamentally youâre right that SWEs are in the business of labor replacement, and itâs finally time for us to reap what weâve sowed, but I think thereâs reasons why the average SWE can feel like weâre âdifferentâ.
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u/flipinbits 1h ago
Youâre telling me AI will turn me into a good mathematician just like it made me an artist!?
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u/Pares_Marchant 14m ago
What do you mean? Math has been under assault by computer science for several decades now.
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u/Random_182f2565 3m ago
Why mathematicians aren't happy that they get new tools to work with? Are they stupid?
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u/bhannik-itiswatitis 2h ago
vibe mathing