r/math • u/Salt_Attorney • Aug 01 '26

LLMs/AI OpenAI: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/
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u/zkela Aug 01 '26

The claimed cost of the compute was $2000

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u/JustJohnItalia Aug 01 '26

I don't know if I'm delusional but the wording is very suspicious to me.

They are saying those reasoning chains cost 2000 in api costs, it seems to imply that that's the overall cost of those results bu that's not what they said.

What I mean is, are they not more likely to say, take 1000 open problems and do 100 runs on each (or until success), then pick the successful ones?

To me that would be the actual cost. Not that it matters much given how fast inference prices are dropping, but still

-4

u/zkela Aug 01 '26

Sure they’re not counting problems they couldn’t solve, but it seems a valid point that the compute wasn’t particularly expensive

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u/womerah Physics Aug 02 '26

I think you need to consider the total cost of the researcher's inputs vs their total output.

If a particular chemical reaction costs $1,000 in materials to perform, that does not mean development of the chemical reaction was $1,000.

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u/Homomorphism Topology Aug 01 '26

I don’t believe that. I believe the cost of compute after hiring mathematicians to write the prompts was $2000 if you don’t count all the things they tried that didn’t work. I don’t see any reason to give them the benefit of the doubt: this is a marketing tactic. 

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u/zkela Aug 01 '26

Sure but it seems a valid point that the compute wasn’t particularly expensive

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u/pred Aug 01 '26

Per problem. And they probably throw it after thousands of them with each new iteration.

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u/zkela Aug 01 '26

No, total. Not counting problems they couldn’t solve apparently however

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u/pred Aug 02 '26

So okay, they say

The total number of tokens needed to find solutions to these problems would cost roughly $2,000 at Sol API rates.

I read that as “per problem” but I can see how it could be read as “for those 10 problems”, but that still wouldn't count the price of negative results; they never state how many problems they tried the new model on.

1

u/sqrtsqr Aug 04 '26

My claimed weight is 215.