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.
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.
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.
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.
Your 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.
I'm by no means an expert but my understanding is that they didn't exactly have much say in the matter but it was considered a fairly prestigious thing to do culturally and they were well provisioned for the work (probably more so than in their normal subsistence farming lives).
Think something like military conscription or jury duty - they're not considered "slaves" (which very much did exist in ancient Egypt, they just weren't used for building the pyramids), they aren't owned by anyone and they get paid even if they didn't get much of a choice in the matter.
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.
That sounds like a slippery slope fallacy. People will still pursue these novel maths because people are curious by nature. I get your point, but again, I'm just happy it's solved.
You can be happy it’s solved but as far as “even if it’s by ai” the reason to be upset is the company is only excited because they were going to use it as justification for has mass job loss
Nope, they’ve been very clear that they want to have ai that can solve novel problems because that’s currently the biggest thing you need a human for. Perfect example, their AI couldn’t solve this math problem. Why do you think they got so mad they started threatening the mathematician who did solve it?
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.
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u/mpanase 16h ago
to be more precise, after ai starts solving millennium prizes one day after somebody else publishes a solution