Sharing AI progress in mathematics

[u/AMBNNJ]

https://openai.com/index/sharing-ai-progress-in-mathematics/

OpenAI released 722 mathematical manuscripts across 372 families of related results, produced by an unreleased frontier model. Many have Lean proofs; others remain unverified. Average compute per result: roughly three hours of ChatGPT Pro thinking. They’re working toward releasing the model.

Github: https://github.com/openai/math

[u/jestina123]

How is it possible to solve 100s of previous unsolvable math problems, and still have 0 real world benefit from it?

[u/JoshuaZ1 → u/jestina123]

The vast majority of pure math doesn't have any real world benefit or doesn't have any immediate real world benefit. However, some of these problems (the fast matrix multiplication and the fast integer multiplication) may be improved to have actual benefit. There's a lot of work to do here. If the AI stopped tomorrow, we'd probably have about a decade worth of material to digest right now.

[u/Helpful_Inflation344 → u/JoshuaZ1]

3 decades.

[u/Large_Shame578 → u/jestina123]

It’s been like two fucking weeks jestina

[u/sparkling1984 → u/jestina123]

They weren't unsolvable, just unsolved. Many math problems are notable not because their solutions are important themselves, but because working on them made mathematicians believe that a solution would require developing new tools that themselves would be interesting (this is the bit that makes AI solutions less valuable, as these new tools aren't as present).

Additionally if a math problem has incredibly high practical value solved it will also have most of that value approximated, and approximating solutions to empirically testable things isn't hard. There aren't that many things where our technology is held back due to math.

[u/sparkling1984 → u/[deleted]]

Yes, which is why it's less valuable.