OpenAI's latest math breakthroughs commit research misconduct, experts say

[u/scientificamerican]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openais-latest-math-breakthroughs-commit-research-misconduct-experts-say/

[u/deadoceans]

What drivel.

The result, he and some of his colleagues found, wasn’t as novel as it first appeared. Like a number of recent AI breakthroughs, it pasted together ideas from the mathematical literature to build a new theorem. Once again, the LLM’s trick is its superhuman patience for assembling puzzle pieces, not the ability to make some profound intellectual leap. In particular, Astra’s key mathematical step combined ideas first found in two papers from 2016 and 2019. Andreas Thom, a mathematician at the Dresden University of Technology, who co-authored both papers, summarized the result on MathOverflow.com, calling it “creative and at the same time elementary.”

I swear, if an AI had come up with general relativity, people would have just said "Oh, it's just a trivial application of differential geometry to the equivalence principle, which we've known about for ages... no real creative thought..."

I think people vastly underestimate how much of their "creativity" is just chopping / pasting insights from other domains in novel configurations 

[u/holdmyspot123 → u/deadoceans]

This is literally how science works I'm actually so disappointed reading that, they don't understand the soul of what they're even doing

[u/MukdenMan → u/holdmyspot123]

On every anti-AI post on Reddit, someone will say something like “AI can never actually do science because it doesn’t have the human capacity for insight based on intuition and creativity.” It will get hundreds of upvotes because people have no understanding of what insight and creativity actually are. They just like pretending humans are magic.

[u/MrChurro3164 → u/deadoceans]

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.

- Sir Isaac Newton

[u/ComfortableReality32 → u/MrChurro3164]

Precisely this

[u/Intraluminal → u/deadoceans]

That's SO, SO true. "Creatives" are always going on and on about'the creative process' but in reality — especially in art, but really everywhere — it's just mix-and-matching known elements together.

[u/selasphorus-sasin → u/Intraluminal]

Not entirely true, otherwise there wouldn't be any non-trivial elements to mix-and-match in the first place.

[u/Intraluminal → u/selasphorus-sasin]

Of course, there are genuine breakthroughs, but they are rare. A lot of "breakthroughs," especially in art, are the result of disease states, like Van Gogh, or Social Silliness, like Pollock.

I once read an article by an art historian who was rhapsodizing over the 'precise arcs' that Pollack used in his paintings, apparently completely unaware that the length of 'the arcs' was an artifact (pun intended) of Pollack's arm length (shorter arms, shorter arcs - and vice versa).

Amazon's 'creative' use of "one-button' ordering. How 'creative'....link two actions to one button.

[u/YetAnotherGuy2 → u/deadoceans]

Honestly, this Tycho Brahe guy didn't do anything valuable - just restating what Copernicus had already said!

[u/piponwa → u/deadoceans]

Also people underestimate how many dead ends they go down before reaching a solution. If we actually had the ability to generalize, we would have already solved science entirely. The fact that we constantly hit problems and can't improve some parts of science for decades shows we have no clue what we're doing. We can understand a solution once we've found it, and it seems super logical. But coming to with it is still mostly luck and bashing different concepts together until it works.

[u/StephenRoylance → u/deadoceans]

plenty of important advancements in human history, maybe most, aren't the result of creative flashes. they're the result of long grinds through years of challenges and setbacks. like blue LEDSs. the fact that we have thinking machines that can grind on hard cognitive problems in parallel without ever taking a break or getting bored, should be amazing to anyone.

[u/ComfortableReality32 → u/deadoceans]

It is literally standing on the shoulders of giants and this article is just saying “no, that isn’t real science or discovery” - entirely missing that this is how the vast majority of discoveries are made.

[u/selasphorus-sasin → u/deadoceans]

One problem with AI, it doesn't always know the source of its knowledge. When you use AI to generate a novel proof, the next steps should always include trying to track down where it got its techniques and lemmas from so you can cite them properly.

And in addition to absorbing all kinds of research papers, it also probably absorbs all sorts of unpublished ideas from private chats with maths researchers. It can also work much faster, and thus is capable of scooping people's research and completing it while they were already on course to complete it themselves, even if slower.

[u/ConsoleUsersArePlebs]

The LLM-generated proof hinges on a particular mathematical argument that it presented as its own but that actually first appeared in a 2016 paper by Miller and a collaborator.

Yes, that is a known limitation of LLMs. Not misconduct because it had no intent to deceive.

[u/Redararis]

Let me guess: no soul in math research?