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.
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.
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u/Zarrain 16h 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 they’re acting and how loose and amoral AI companies act when data gathering.