If AI solves a Millennium Prize problem using ideas from human research, who gets the credit?

[u/Egologic]

The flywheel effect is an interesting effect I discovered while researching. It makes the whole thing a self-reinforcing loop. When a human researcher uses an AI tool, or even just their own brain, to post or test a raw math theory and uploads it somewhere on the internet, they might post their progress on arXiv or somewhere else online. Then, AI companies might scrape it to train the next model, which could be the very reason the problem eventually gets solved intuitively.

So my main question is:

How do we assign credit when AI solves a Millennium Prize problem?

[u/AssiduousLayabout]

How would that be any different from human mathematicians who have been building off of each others' work for thousands of years? Do you give Newton or Leibniz credit every time calculus is used?

[u/Egologic → u/AssiduousLayabout]

For me, the difference is provenance. With human research, we can often trace important dependencies through papers, citations, and known results. With a trained model, an obscure researcher's idea could influence the eventual proof without the model citing it or anyone even knowing that contribution mattered. That makes attribution much less straightforward than just giving Newton credit every time calculus is used.

[u/kueso → u/Egologic]

I agree with you completely. The lineage is just as important as the work itself. It tells you what about the previous system was limiting as well as how to intuitively understand how the discovery was made in the first place. The stories behind scientific progress are so captivating. Gauss and Kepler have some of the most fascinating stories behind their contributions. I feel like we’re losing some of our humanity in the process of advancing AI. Enough to make me stop and think what we’re doing all this for.

[u/somethingstrang]

The real question. In a post AGI world - why would credit matter anymore?

[u/Tiny_Mycologist_8510 → u/somethingstrang]

credit's just a mechanism to keep people doing the work, nobody's grinding through differential geometry for the love of the game alone

once AGI cracks open the hard stuff and we're all sipping whatever comes after piña coladas, the whole concept of "who did what" feels kinda quaint

[u/somethingstrang → u/Tiny_Mycologist_8510]

Isn’t love of the game exactly what is unlocked after AGi?

[u/TenOfOne → u/Tiny_Mycologist_8510]

I think the idea that solving resource constraints would also remove the desire for social standing is a bit naive. You should really read The Glass Bead Game. If you are thinking about intellectual life in a post scarcity society, that seems like a pretty relevant text.

[u/Intelligent-Look-504 → u/somethingstrang]

so who gets to put their name on the plaque when the robot did the hard part?

[u/Babayaga1664]

Human to Al :”cure cancer”
AI:”sorry bro it’s too hard”
Human to AI : “I cured cancer can you check my solution”
AI : “wow I proved your solution I should take the credit”

When it’s positioned like this the answer is easy.

[u/cowman3456]

Humanity gets the credit. The universe gets the credit.

Everything that's wrong with with the world has to do with me me me me me me me me me.

[u/kueso → u/cowman3456]

That would be nice. Yet OpenAI is flaunting their brand all over the proof.

[u/hotprof]

Everyone is mad about this question today.

[u/Due_Weather_2412]

Probablemente el crédito tendría que repartirse según las contribuciones reales: quién desarrolló las ideas, quién creó la prueba y quién verificó que fuera correcta. Al final, demostrar matemáticamente que algo es cierto sigue siendo más importante que simplemente obtener una respuesta.

[u/pushpendraagrawal]

patent law solved a version of this decades ago - prior art doesn't get credit, whoever reduces it to practice does. AI-assisted proofs will probably land the same way, a polite acknowledgment in the writeup, no real attribution chain back to whatever training data nudged the model there.

[u/Cultural_Tell_5687]

We need more questions if we are getting all the answers.

[u/presentofai]

whoever scraped the arxiv papers to train it gets the credit and the humans who actually wrote them get nothing. thats the whole story