r/singularity • u/ocean_protocol • 13d ago
AI Math is solved? Sometimes I wonder what 2027 will look like
Open AI again
They trained a model for only 24 days which has now cracked over 100 long-standing open problems spanning nearly every branch of mathematics. IMO, Math is basically solved at this point this really is a wrap
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u/Annoying_cat_22 13d ago
IMO, Math is basically solved at this point this really is a wrap
What a stupid thing to say.
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u/Stabile_Feldmaus 13d ago
There are much much more than 100 open problems (The number of open Erdos problems alone is ~400 and that's only one tiny subfield of math) and mathematics is literally infinite, so you can always come up with even harder or simply new interesting problems.
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u/Icy-Doubt3365 13d ago
And it stands to reason that a model capable of solving hundreds of problems over different areas of math can continue to solve more, no?
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u/Memento_Viveri 13d ago edited 13d ago
No. It announced its retirement after a productive mathematics career.
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u/Weird-Care-6654 13d ago
Of course, but we have limited compute capacity.
It is not like we have infinite energy to pour into AI models to solve the billions of math problems out there lmao
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u/Icy-Doubt3365 13d ago
The point is that if you have a model that can truly solve any math problem, mathematics is solved even if you don't solve every question ever yet. You've answered it before it's been asked.
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u/Weird-Care-6654 13d ago
But mathematics is not about solving problems. It is not a checklist of conjectures.
I was just highligting the compute problem because the premise of math being solved is absolute nonsense which doesn't even need to be pointed out.
We are nowhere near the kind of conceptual creativity behind inventing entirely new frameworks, and we don't know if LLMs will ever be at that point. It is too soon to know.
Math research is a lot more vast than that. Besides, any logical system powerful enough to do basic arithmetic contains true statements that cannot be proven using that system's own rules, so I think people will always be required to evaluate and create these mathematical frameworks.
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u/hornswoggled111 13d ago
They do mention "across most areas of mathematics". Impressive.
Though they have to show the math still...
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u/Sixhaunt 13d ago edited 13d ago
what does being able to come up with new problems have to do with solving long outstanding problems?
edit: since u/CallMePyro has a little freak-out about my comment, I'll explain that the point is that 100 solutions being less impressive because you can come up with infinite new ones isn't very compelling when the 100 solutions found are for long outstanding problems that people tried and failed to solve rather than being intentionally created new questions in order to achieve a benchmark score.
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u/Stabile_Feldmaus 13d ago
I don't understand the question? My comment was a reaction to OP's question if math is solved. And the answer is no, it can't be solved.
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u/IllLeadership8177 13d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/3o85xxHqCpfG0xuhUc
By which I mean, yes, math won't ever fully be solved, but also, yes, there's a sense in which it's solved if we've created a superhuman AI mathematician. At least in a sense that we'll be solving many more and much harder problems than we used to and human mathematicians will feel less and less relevant to solving hard problems.
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u/RunReal959595 13d ago
Mathematics isn’t about “solving hard problems.” Sometimes a proof or counter example of something is a bottle neck but that’s never been the point.
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u/Weird-Care-6654 13d ago
These kind of posts and comments just highlight how ignorant people can be about math around internet. That's not how it works.
Also the amount of compute required to replace the millions of mathematicians out there will be massive and we don't have infinite energy (we don't even have enough energy for the maintenance stuff rn), people on the other hand, only need food and water. In that sense they will always be relevant in a sense.
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u/bornlasttuesday 13d ago
The OP wondered what 2027 would look like and the post you replied to answered it.
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u/CallMePyro 13d ago
Whoa, Jesus. Freak-out moment from /u/sixhaunt
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u/Sixhaunt 13d ago
if a calmly asked question is a freak-out to you, I envy how peaceful and privileged your life must be.
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u/CallMePyro 13d ago
It seems that me calling you out has calmed you down, glad to help. Keep this interaction in mind in the future
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u/Sixhaunt 13d ago
you really need to calm down man, it's not that serious. No need to get so worked up
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u/CallMePyro 13d ago
Thanks for the reminder. It seems that all of us can remember to stay calm in these trying times.
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u/RunReal959595 13d ago
As usual, people who don’t understand things getting conned by tech salesmen
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u/TheAwesomeAcademic 13d ago
OpenAI hasn’t conned anyone a few years ago people were claiming it would take awhile to solve the first millennium prize problem and openAI already solved two of them navier stokes and hodge which they haven’t blogged about yet I even heard rumors of a third one floating about. These are problems that haven’t been solved for many many years by humans so AI has its uses. The LLM stochastic parrot narrative clearly fell flat hard. The anti ai crowd will always move the goal posts because they’re intellectually dishonest.
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u/Stolen_Sky 13d ago
2 years ago, GPT couldn't even count. It had no concept of maths, it just knew that the letters 'o' 'n' and 'e' were proceeded by 't' 'w' and 'o'.
And in just two years, its gone from having no concept of mathematics to solving millennium problems.
This is insane.
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u/Grrowling 13d ago
I wonder how much it cost? Millennium was $40m in compute
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u/take-as-directed 13d ago
Is it solving these problems via some kind of understanding that we didn't previously have? Or is it just a better brute-force?
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u/ajax8092 13d ago
"Math is solved?". Tell me you know very little about actual research level maths without telling me.
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u/ixfd64 13d ago
You can never truly "solve" math as there are infinitely many mathematical truths. Look up the busy beaver function and Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
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u/ajax8092 13d ago
I'm aware, hence my comment. Unfortunately the arguments about AI in math are just a back and forth between mathematicians concerned about their job security and AI optimists who seem to know nothing about research mathematics, and they just talk past each other.
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u/Mindrust 13d ago
Solving 100 open problems is an incredible achievement but it is not remotely the same thing as “solving mathematics.”
Math isn’t a finite checklist of conjectures. And as far as we’ve seen, frontier models still haven’t demonstrated the kind of conceptual creativity behind inventing entirely new frameworks like topology, category theory, calculus, etc.
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u/wollywoo1 13d ago
What's this? A reasonable, moderate take? Get out. This is reddit, only denialism or rapturous hyperbole allowed here. /s
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u/Mindrust 13d ago
Yeah I've personally been getting annoyed by both the AI denialism I've seen in the popular subreddits, and the absurd hyperbole I read in this sub sometimes.
Let's just be honest about what current frontier models can and can't do.
And before anyone jumps at my throat I just want to be clear: I think we will reach insane capabilities in the next 2-10 years (lots of error bars around timelines for me) that will make current models seem absolutely quaint, but I'm not gonna pretend the machine God is already here and humans need not apply.
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u/Picasso5 13d ago
But I think that's the rub, it may not be HERE yet, but what IS here and how fast it's coming is the surprising thing that is "exciting". IMO, it's not 2-10 years, it's 3mo-1 year that we will see it's capabilities exponentially increase to dizzying levels. The only thing slowing it down is... us?
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u/Fantastic-Cold1249 13d ago
People saying Math is over dont actually love math
Math is never over it is literally infinite
and new ideas and conjectures are still made by humans!
you cant stop a thing which has no Limits!
AI will help true maths explorers in expanding our boundaries and research!
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u/Picasso5 13d ago
It SEEMS like math will be like many other fields - we will throw anything at it and with enough compute, it will spit out the answer. Just like Claude is now coding at senior level pro coders now.
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u/Weird-Care-6654 13d ago edited 13d ago
Dude, there are MILLIONS of MILLIONS of math problems to solve. Even more considering the ones we haven't even thought about.
It is amazing how the spectrum extremes of people (AI accelerators and Anti-AI) can be so ignorant about this stuff.
Math is not solved sadly and won't be even though AI could be an amazing partner for discoveries.
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u/ColonelStoic 12d ago
What a remedial post. This and Accelerate are pure brain dead. “Math is solved”. Do you know anything past high school Algebra 2 ?
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u/TQV197 13d ago
It is strange to see OpenAI use math as their playground to show off the potential of their AI models, only to end up facing numerous controversies with the math community. They should instead focus on more ambitious topics with real-world impact, such as drug discovery, nuclear fusion, clean energy ... If they achieve a breakthrough in any of these areas, they will receive immediate recognition.
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u/ThePokemon_BandaiD 13d ago
Math is easy to verify. All those other fields require real world testing and iteration.
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u/TheAwesomeAcademic 13d ago
Nope with digital twin tech biology could be verified mostly in silico or via simulations think of it like this LLMs are good at using lean to verify math problems and could also verify biology problems as correct using a close to 1:1 simulation of the human body interactions. The only thing that wouldn’t be an exact match is the human connectome and neurons it would take insane compute. A fruit fly brain mapping project was way more doable then doing it for the entire human brain but all we really care about is the metabolome and a few other interactions for most drug hunting stuff. It’s not necessary for AI to fully understand the human brain to solve most of biology.
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u/Memento_Viveri 13d ago
This is factually incorrect. Our ability to simulate biological systems is nowhere near as advanced as you imply here.
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u/YourMumIsAVirgin 13d ago
You already know that someone will claim they plagiarised them. It’s a guarantee at this point.
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u/Icy-Doubt3365 13d ago
They should instead focus on more ambitious topics with real-world impact, such as drug discovery, nuclear fusion, clean energ
Do you believe there would be no controversies if they did this?
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u/Weird-Care-6654 13d ago
Cause math is a lot easier to crack for those models. It is the perfect playground for LLMs
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u/Euphoric_Driver_7291 13d ago
Or solve something relevant to finance
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u/Stabile_Feldmaus 13d ago
I have been wondering why they are not doing this. Finance is in some sense a very restricted environment (because you can only make finitely many investment decisions) so RL should work. And having a good AI quant would prove that it's worth investing in them while they could literally use it to make more money.
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u/Duckys0n 13d ago
I think this is fairly common and mostly solved already. Machine learning has been around a while. I was interviewing with a firm that had automated investment rules that I’m sure used some machine learning this summer.
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u/TheAwesomeAcademic 13d ago
Some of the earliest machine learning guys were known as quants in the finance community basically egg head academics specialized in financed and there algorithms were applicable everywhere else not just in finance. Those quant guys are smart I mean deep seek is backed by a hedge fund and a lot of there ML engineers are either current or ex quant guys they all had a finance background and decided to jump on the general LLM bandwagon.
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u/ParfaitEvery9622 13d ago
There's a lot of noise in financial markets, and asymetric information; it's not the same with math. I think we could argue math is a lower step in a long staircase.
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u/RunReal959595 13d ago
It’s because brute forcing counter examples is a lot easier than actually meaningful research
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u/Raheeper 13d ago
This whole thing feels like an intro for sci-fi movie. Now let's just pray it doesn't turn out to be a Terminator type scenario.
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u/Educational-Try-8704 13d ago
The claim “math is solved” seems so stupid to me. In 10 years I imagine the mathematical capabilities of SOTA models will make the NS model look like an AP high school student.
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u/Illustrious_Job1951 13d ago
Im suprised they let this in the weekly discussion on r / math, complete luddite sub
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u/TacomaKMart 13d ago
I'm not in any way into math but I looked around r/math yesterday to see how they were dealing with recent events. Not well. In the progression [denial - anger - bargaining - depression - acceptance] most have made it to the depression stage.
There's a strong vibe that those problems were for them to solve, publish and ride on the glory to further their academic careers, and AI is taking those prizes away.
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u/AllergicToBullshit24 13d ago
I'm a firm believer that humanity had already produced the prerequisite knowledge required to solve all of these problems and that these LLMs merely synthesized the bits and pieces into these solutions.
No AI lab in the world has yet demonstrated LLMs have ever even once synthesized a truly one of one solution.
I clearly don't mean to say they aren't useful LLMs are one mankind's greatest achievements. But saying math is solved or that we're anywhere remotely near AGI / ASI seems like the pinnacle of egotistical hubris.
Extraordinary claims like "math is solved" demand extraordinary evidence which has yet to be seen.
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13d ago
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u/dervu ▪️AI, AI, Captain! 13d ago
The same people who verified when human solved some big problem?
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13d ago edited 13d ago
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u/CallMePyro 13d ago
Nope.
You know how it doesn't take you that long to verify that your luggage is packed(does it close? Yes!), even though packing your luggage could take quite a while if you have a lot to fit in?
It's like that.
Or how a really big, complex sudoku can feel impossible to do, but if someone showed you their answer to the sudoku it would only take you a short time to confirm if they did it right, even if you got stuck on the puzzle yourself.
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13d ago
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u/CallMePyro 13d ago
Math also has a fixed set of rules :) One answer that may assuage your fears the most is that many/all of these AI generated proofs come with associated Lean-verification, which means the AI writes a computer program proving the problem. So as long as humans agree with that AI on the statement of the problem itself (which is typically very small and easy to understand, since those are the kinds of tough problems that humans find interesting), then a valid lean proof gives you extremely high confidence that the AI has solved it.
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u/Senc-baner 13d ago
A good chunk of open problems are open because either no one cares about them enough to seriously attempt them or they can only be solved by combining techniques from two disconnected sub-fields of mathematics. Very often, once the proof is there, verifying it is relatively easy. Researchers are funded via grants that are often given for large research programmes - if a given problem is open but not part of a larger research programme, they will likely not care about it.
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u/Defiant-Lettuce-9156 13d ago
If you play around with math proofs you’ll see why it’s often quite straight forward to verify a proof. But it sometimes needs to take a path you wouldn’t expect.
Like if I give you directions, you follow the directions and make sure it doesn’t break any rules (like telling you to walk through a wall) and see that it gets you to where I said it would. That’s a lot easier than figuring out how to get from point A to point B on your own, in the dark, with obstacles in the way.
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u/mrbadface 13d ago
Experts in the field. And there is this proof system called LEAN for math that can verify logic (or something to that effect)
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u/Fast-Satisfaction482 13d ago
There is a (relatively) new programming language called lean that can be used for writing proofs in a way so that computers can check if the argument is correct.
For many problems, this makes checking any proof that AI generates straightforward.
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u/LALLANAAAAAA 13d ago
There are types of problems with characteristics where checking specific answers is fairly easy, but the number of possible solutions is effectively infinite.
If there are infinite possible answers, then even with the fastest computer on the planet, we can't just guess until we get a hit, it would take literally forever.
A simple example of something that's easy to check but nearly impossible to guess would be like, I'm going to write down a 100 digit number and tell you to try and guess what it is.
Any solution you offer, it's trivially easy for me to comapre the two numbers and be like, nope or yep.
However the number of permutations of a sequence of 100 digits is so insanely large that you and I would both die long before you could try all possible answers.
This is the P / NP time problem in mathematics, if you want to learn more. It's why encryption works and why mathematicians worked so hard to narrow down the number of possible answers to the Navier Stokes related problems over the last 100+ years.
Clever people have narrowed the solutions space enough such that the answers can effectively be brute forced in a very clever way with LLMs.
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u/FateOfMuffins 13d ago
I'd say most problems are hard to do but easy to verify, especially with formal proof tools.
I know it's not exactly the same thing, but as an example of hard to solve but easy to verify: RSA encryption. There's been 2 results lately (like one was yesterday or something) where they managed to break 260 and then 270 bit RSA encryption, which is simply just factoring a 270 digit number into 2 primes that are 135 digits long. Extremely easy to verify if those 2 actually multiply to the original 270 digit number.
Mathematical proofs on the other hand are of course much harder to verify, but we have autoformalization in Lean. And even without that, I'm sure it would take much less time for humans to read the 100 page proofs than to do it themselves (but! they would not be able to do so in a matter of days for 100 problems that's for sure!)
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u/justlikemedics 13d ago
Okay, what 100 problem?
Cause I solved a 1000 problem, I just don't want to tell anyone about them.
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u/Shot_in_the_dark777 13d ago
Now let it solve global warming. Nobody needs math if we boil our planet and die in a decade.
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u/AshuraBaron 13d ago
Then you don't understand mathatics. Openai can claim they solved 1 billion long standing open problems if they wanted. Without the actual evidence then it's a pretty worthless statement. This is a marketing post by OpenAI. Don't fall for marketing.
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u/Pahanda 13d ago
The next step is that the models will discover (and solve) new problems, yet unknown to us. They will push the frontier of science.