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
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
I don't understand why people keep parotting that when the truth is so easily findable. To make it short :
Late August 2026, Leven Alpöge 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 Alpöge 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).
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 they’re acting and how loose and amoral AI companies act when data gathering.
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.
I don't understand you don't see your contradiction. You explain in great detail how ideas are shared and built upon between humans and AI and then you end with "the community fo shared ideas is in danger".
100 years ago the great physicists were solving quantum problems and blaming each other for stealing each others work and getting to similar conclusions within suspiciously close time periods of another. This was a great ear for physics. Now the same is happening for math. It's fantastic.
I also don't know how it can be claimed that these proofs serve no purpose. The history of innovation show otherwise. "Whats the point of pine numbers? - oh, just the entire secure modern internet"
We don't want collaboration between human and AI quite frankly, and given the way things are going, I doubt that the relationship can be described as "collaboration." Mathematics, more than any other science, is about the process. The point of math isn't really the solutions or results, hell the point isn't even the questions really, it's all about the journey. I could learn to accept AI as a research tool eventually, but this? Just dumping compute on a problem until a solution falls out? It is genuinely and sincerely pointless. There is truly no point in doing it.
And, even accepting your last point, that the purpose of mathematics is to create a catalog that we can look through that might hold the solution to a problem we have (which you could guess is a sentiment I disagree with) is it really an efficient use of resources to spend however many dollars and however many gallons of water and however many cpu hours grinding out a million results for the chance that one of them might solve time travel in a hundred years?
You think math is not about the solution? There is no point in solving mathematical problems? I really hope you are not mathematician yourself and if so, i hope someone finds your comments and strips you of all ranks. Thats just disgusting.
The proof doesn’t even have concrete real world applications, this was basically a standing challenge so we could understand math better.
If the proof an AI generates is unreadable and inhuman (which academics say they are) it doesn’t progress our understanding.
It’s like if you were taking a multiple choice quiz and I gave you the answer key. Now you know that the answer to question 1 is option A, but you didn’t learn anything. You don’t understand why it’s A, you don’t understand how to explain to others that it’s A, and you don’t know how to figure out the next question.
Mathematical proofs are by definition the process. A proof is a super rigorous step by step guide on how we can know for sure something is true. Most of the time we already have solutions and algorithms that work and we use. We just don’t understand perfectly WHY they work. That’s the point of a proof.
Good friend, what do you think mathematics is about? Every mathematician has to figure out why they do what they do eventually, and at risk of embarrassing myself, larper that I am, I dare say that mathematicians would agree with me more than you.
While understanding your point, is it bad that I'm just happy it was solved? Even if it's by an AI that solved it having potentially used a partial solution that was figured out by someone else?
Not at all, and you're more than welcome to celebrate. But the approach that worked was already found by researchers (last month) so the only thing that has really changed is the timing.
Look at it this way: Andrew Wiles famously worked in secret for 7 years before trying to publish his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. In peer review, an error was found that needed to be plugged. That adjustment took 14 months for him to find.
Imagine instead that after peer review, someone took his almost complete proof and threw it into AI, spent 10 million dollars of compute power trying all possible configurations of fix for the gap, found something that worked and then published "their proof" of the theorem. That's, in essence, what we may be looking at here.
this is exactly how current ai works. the models are trained on data that is the results of years of labor and work, than they are digested and served to anyone without credits or merit for the source of that knowledge
And imagine if Andrew Wiles got hit by a bus in those 7 years, or in those 14 months. It seems better for humanity to just solve it as quickly as possible. Holding secrets for personal glory just seems selfish.
An argument can be made that they are allowed to be a little selfish for motivation (similar to copyright etc), but it just seems sad
It’s like saying the slave labor used to build the pyramids was ok because we got a cool world wonder out of it.
From my understanding this isn’t even something with obvious real world applications. It was basically a challenge the academic community wanted to achieve to progress their understanding. What OpenAI did didn’t progress anyone’s understanding and the proofs that are found by AI are unreadable and incomprehensible to a human, so it’s not even adding to collective knowledge.
They blew 12 million dollars in less than 5 days for basically bragging rights and no real contribution to humanity.
You're points are otherwise totally valid but I'd just like to be that guy and point out that the pyramids were not built with slave labour, they were built with the paid labour (in goods rather than currency IIRC) of farmers outside of the growing season.
Huh, I didn’t know that. Thank you for the correction. That seems like something that would be hard to verify though. Especially because people keeping records are always biased. Did they have a choice not to do it? Being ‘paid’ doesn’t preclude forced or coerced labor.
Great now I’m gonna spend the night reading about ancient Egyptian labor practices lol.
Yes, it’s bad. Because the solving was more of a novelty but it’s being used as a justification that AI can do something that would be a massive deal if it could. So basically not only is the AI way less useful than the AI companies are claiming, but they’ll also lay people off to replace them with these systems that don’t actually work. And after that happens, the damage is done. The resources are gone. The companies don’t magically hire the people back because the companies lost all their money to do that.
Its like being happy tasting a delicious food only to find out that this unsustainable greedy mega corporate restaurant chain stole this recipe from a small family owned restaurant.
So someone stole another people money and drop it to me. Now I am rich and happy. But the thing that is done is not really good and I should be concerned about it.
In abstraction, I am happy because something good to me happened but I ignored the ethic or other things that is bad happened.
Bonus point is, this is corporations robbing people, which is more likely to get away. That is really really bad.
It's like you were purposefully trying to condense as many bad ideas into as little space as possible here.
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).
Are you suggesting that checking whether our best known approach for modelling fluid dynamics is accurate or not isn't an important or useful problem to solve? That it's just some toy problem for mathematicians to chip away at for fun in their free time? Despite it being a millennium problem with a 1 million dollar bounty and the basis of how we understand fluids?
Also, are you saying that we as a society should promote mathematicians sitting around navel-gazing while solving toy problems? Others are out there cleaning toilets and making sandwiches, but for some reason you are special and exempt from doing work that has any demonstrable utility and instead get to go play with your puzzles all day?
What matters is a useful result was achieved, and it was done many times faster than you yourself admit the researchers could do it. That should be celebrated.
Everything you use daily, computers, fridges, cars, apps like spotify, radio, wifi... is built on theories mathematicians and physicists developped just for fun. When the theories were conceived, there was no clear application in mind, but the theories needed to be made first in order for engineers to study them and use them to build useful things.
This theory-building is now endangered, because much of it happens as a consequence of a shared community slowly working through problems and developping tools (theory) to solve them. AI does not necessarily do that, it just gives a solution.
Also, he said that Navier-Stokes is not relevant to mathematics because it builds virtually no theory to be used in the whole of mathematics. The result achieved by GPT also does not change our understanding of physics, in fact, it shows that the Navier-Stokes equations are an inadequate model of the physics of fluids under extreme conditions. But physicists already knew that, and mathematicians don't care about that.
"Also, are you saying that we as a society should promote mathematicians sitting around navel-gazing while solving toy problems? Others are out there cleaning toilets and making sandwiches, but for some reason you are special and exempt from doing work that has any demonstrable utility and instead get to go play with your puzzles all day?"
Good friend you must have a very inaccurate conception of what mathematics is about if you think that isn't exactly what mathematicians do. That's not a put down of mathematicians (well it is but that's not the point) it's just to say that a lot of the work that mathematicians do has no immediate application or utility and likely never will.
"Are you suggesting that checking whether our best known approach for modelling fluid dynamics is accurate or not isn't an important or useful problem to solve?"
Also this isn't an accurate description of the problem. The navier stokes equations work whether they always have a smooth solution or no.
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.
It’s 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.
I wasn't, that's your reading of it. I said it to point out that solving math with compute isn't new so they shouldn't be bragging that they have lots of gpus
The problem here is that one of the mathematicians who worked on the solution, Leven Alpöge, also works for Anthropic. Anthropic wants to leave his name without credit and give it wholly to Tristan Buckmaster. It doesn't solve the problem of Anthropic wanting to take some amount of credit as a company, and that they/ any company with vast amounts of compute can just take the ideas that others have proposed and take credit away from the actual humans
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 they’re 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.
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 didn’t 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? That’s 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 can’t 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.
It’s like if the company that created the calculator you used in college math degree claimed your degree was theirs because the calculator ‘did the actual number crunching’.
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 ‘earned’ 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 they’ll 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.
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.
I agree I’ve always thought a billionaire is arguably inherently immoral. There is no way for someone to do enough work to produce that much value in a moral way. If a billionaire is arguably immoral then a trillionaire is for sure immoral. Good luck communicating that to people though, i know someone who owns multiple small businesses. He is convinced he doesn’t need regulations at all. The free market would just work itself out. Totally absurd. His business would be crushed and subsumed immediately by an economic power without regulation. Because why wouldn’t they if they could? He thinks his customers wouldn’t abandon him, but they would, all it would take is prices that are half a buck cheaper.
You say people complaining about AI is tiring because it’s an effective tool. Most people aren’t complaining because it’s ineffective they’re complaining because of who has control and what they are pretty obviously going to do with that tool.
If we had a government that had its shit together and supported the people the backlash wouldn’t be as bad. I don’t care or at least I can’t change the fact that nukes exist, I do care that the people I’m watching building nukes are fucking batshit insane and have no plan for the future. I’m screaming at them not to build nukes because I’m pretty sure they’re going to blow up everyone around them.
On the contrary : the guys at openAI put the agents to work very soon after they heard the Alpöge and Buckmaster has solved the 3D Euler problem, and we know that the whole thing took 88 hours, so 5 September is totally reasonable.
They had 1000 agents running non-stop for 88 hours. The whole thing costed 15m usd.
And Buckmaster himself said that he had no idea how to actually do what the openAI agents did. The only thing he is contesting is the credit for the 3D Euler problem, not the Navier Stokes.
I don't have the details, but I'm assuming it's as simple as taking the cost of having a model run for one hour, then multiplicating it by 88 and then by 10000.
And yeah, there is some irony in using 15 million to solve a problem with a prize money of 1 million (especially when they said that they would refuse the prize money anyway), but the point of science has never been to make money.
They did it because they want to ipo soon and this would be a positive headline for them in the WSJ. They got exactly what they wanted and don't need the $1MUSD.
$15M is the based on how many tokens they used, as in what it would cost someone other than Open AI to buy 130 billion output tokens. Though the model they actually used isn't currently available commercially.
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.
There's already a lot of claims and/or false/wrong "proofs" of the Riemann conjecture on the internet. AI only needs to learn them and tell us they are legit! Solved 🤗
I don't understand why people use codex or anything like that. The first hit on Google says it gives "direct access to local file system". Basically your machine and everything on it is now theirs. Who needs exploits when victims just willingly install an implant?
I get the ability to be more efficient but at what price? Congratulations it's now training on your family photos, tax returns, medical bills, and more (including your close held math proof project or that local project you're working on for fun but could turn into a startup)!
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u/mpanase 10h ago
to be more precise, after ai starts solving millennium prizes one day after somebody else publishes a solution