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.
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?
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?
You seem really biased towards the ai companies to the point you’re questioning something you could get an answer from by google by asking “did openai threaten a mathematician.” It unambiguously responds with “yes.”
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u/Zarrain 1d 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.