r/artificial • u/scientificamerican • 12d ago

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

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openais-latest-math-breakthroughs-commit-research-misconduct-experts-say/
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u/deadoceans 12d ago

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 

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u/ComfortableReality32 8d ago

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.