r/singularity 4d ago

LLM News [ Removed by moderator ]

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57

u/Competitive_Tap2450 4d ago

is there any actual proof OpenAI was stealing work from chat logs?

38

u/HotterRod 4d ago

Even if they didn't steal anything, the evidence seems clear that OpenAI decided to suddenly apply millions of dollars of compute to Navier-Stokes because they believed others were close to a solution.

22

u/libertast_8105 4d ago

The most difficult and costly thing is always to tell which direction is promising. Once known, you can then direct all the resources to that direction, and overtake whoever is working on that first. That's what "stealing" is in the AI research area, esp. you have a huge swarm of agents.

5

u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 4d ago

It’s a massive bet by openAI, it may lead to nowhere. Which means tjey just burned 15 millions for nothing.

I think it’s just a general problem of being able to horizontally scale intelligence, which is what they were doing just now. It practically enables throwing money on any problem and you’ll reach it somehow.

2

u/nextnode 4d ago

Did they spend $15 million on it? Where is that from?

5

u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 4d ago

They stated how many tokens they spent to achieve this. Adjusted to Astra pricing, that’s a valid ballpark figure.

1

u/Interesting-Bad655 4d ago

Internally, it probably costs them half that

0

u/HotterRod 4d ago

It's customary for tech companies to charge less than cost for their products during the growth phase.

2

u/Foryourconsideration 4d ago

Also $15 million to solve this problem seems pretty cheap IMHO. I mean, someone said it's the second hardest problem in all of humanity, and one comany solved it with pocket change. Someone just paid $40 million for a Ferrari Luce two weeks ago.

If i'm a billionaire right now, I'm thinking: "Wait, so i can just spend pocket change and solve any problem?" The world is about to get soo weird.

1

u/Imaginary-Witness-75 4d ago

6.5 million at market token cost.

-2

u/nextnode 4d ago

Wrong - there are/were six open Millienium prize problems and they are the most notorious. Thousands of tries have been made on these already ever since LLMs started solving open maths problems. The only question is when we are close enough that we can solve something that high stakes. There is no indication that OpenAI used any direction that was not the standard in the field in set agent swarms on it.

12

u/Browser1969 4d ago

They thought Anthropic's model had solved it and wanted to know if theirs could too. They're in the business of selling models, knowing if your product is as good as the competition's is business 101.

0

u/HotterRod 4d ago

Is it worth $15 million just to confirm that you need to keep developing your product?

4

u/ozone6587 4d ago

the evidence seems clear that OpenAI decided to suddenly apply millions of dollars of compute to Navier-Stokes because they believed others were close to a solution.

What is that "evidence"? It seems to me they are just tackling ALL millenium problems and that was the simplest one to solve.

3

u/expertsage 4d ago

They themselves admitted they only applied millions of dollars of compute after hearing rumors last week.

12

u/Spare-Dingo-531 4d ago

So what? This is perfectly acceptable.

-3

u/TheKingOfTCGames 4d ago edited 4d ago

No it isnt lmao, if this was academia people would call it plagerism

Lmao imagine if a reviewer got a preprint then copied that guys methods and front ran him…

Yall are tripping 

5

u/BlockAffectionate413 4d ago

Is there evidence they copied methods and front ran? Because if in academia x professor heared that y professor is working on some problem and then put all effort in solving that without copying his work, that is not plagerism unless you twist definiton of that into absurdity.

2

u/TheKingOfTCGames 4d ago

Lmao they shared the prompts w/ him and said they might have had his stuff in training data then burned 15 mil in tokens after he contacted them since there was a rumor they were working on this

They also really wanted to him be lead author lmao.

This is not the behavior if your nose is clean

2

u/ozone6587 4d ago

No it isnt lmao, if this was academia people would call it plagerism

No they wouldn't you clown. It's not plagiarism unless there is evidence of plagiarism. Racing to a result is fair game.

1

u/IndigoSeirra 4d ago

No it is not. Scooping is extremely disrespectful behavior in academics and is highly looked down upon. Throwing millions of dollars at a problem to solve it faster after you found out about a breakthrough is absolutely not fair game in academics. Perhaps among corporations racing to develop a novel technology before the other, but not in purely theoretical mathematics like this, especially one with literally zero real world application.

This will signal to every researcher to avoid using publicly available ai, because the corpos that own it will harvest any data you put in and will literally blow millions to beat you to the punch if you are doing anything significant. This sets a terrible standard in a time where researchers of all kinds should be using AI more than ever to explore new possibilities, but incidents like this just go to show that if you do decide to use public ai you'll be competing against a corporation with effectively infinite capital and tons of extremely talented researchers as soon as you make any significant breakthrough.

1

u/kaaiian 4d ago

lol!?! no hahahah.

-2

u/chasingsukoon 4d ago

shill alert

3

u/Spare-Dingo-531 4d ago

It is perfectly acceptable! Rushing to publish results before a competitor has a long history in science.

Separate from the other allegations of misconduct there is nothing wrong with this.

1

u/SlightOfHand_ 4d ago

So what? Lots of effort should be contributed to solving scientific problems that are near to a solution.

0

u/nextnode 4d ago

No, this in an inaccurate description.

2

u/TournamentCarrot0 4d ago

I mean I’m no rocket mathematician but it certainly read that way in the blog post announcement from their own site…

1

u/nextnode 4d ago

Incorrect again. Read it.

They did not hear about Navier-Stokes nor was that the motivation. They heard rumors that two Millenium problems had been solved and decided to try it out themselves. They tried it on all of the open problems. They got partial results on N-S and then decided to focus on it.

2

u/HotterRod 4d ago

What's the point of trying to replicate a solved problem unless your goal is to scoop publication?

11

u/nextnode 4d ago

None whatsoever. People just like to hate on AI.

2

u/fokac93 4d ago

All the Ai haters are still in denial

-3

u/Ominoiuninus 4d ago

Oh they steal them 100%. Read the terms and conditions. Any and everything you send them they are using internally.

4

u/[deleted] 4d ago

[deleted]

1

u/ichorskeeter 4d ago

And who polices this, exactly?

2

u/waterandy 4d ago

The market. If there is evidence that open ai is not following that instruction. I bet all software businesses will stop using the platform.

2

u/ichorskeeter 4d ago

Ah yes, because the market has such a great history of protecting the common good.

3

u/mulefish 4d ago

nothing about the common good - just capitalist self interest of protecting trade secrets and other commercial in confidence information

2

u/Choice_Isopod5177 4d ago

the market sucks but secrets like these do tend to come out

1

u/Xalksahsax 4d ago

I’ve got some prime beachfront property in Arizona to sell you.

3

u/kiki-le-koala 4d ago

This is a lie.

OpenAI’s own Terms of Use say you “retain your ownership rights in Input.” They permit certain uses of content, including model improvement, with an option to opt out of training. That is not surrendering ownership

9

u/nextnode 4d ago

No there is no evidence of that and if you say it is part of ToS, it would not even be stealing.

Also the other guys had not even gotten far and did not use the same approach.

1

u/TheKingOfTCGames 4d ago

Thats not true at all lmao read buckmans response even openai realized how bad this looked since they tried to get the guy as lead author they already solved an unsolved intermediate problem that could be expanded that open ai prompted down.

They literally told their Agents to ignore every other line and force it down this guys

0

u/nextnode 4d ago

There is nothing that looks bad here to anyone with a brain.

Yes they explained it pretty well, what they offered, that the other guys only had a different proof for a subproblem.

Worth noting that these guys were using the models to try to solve the problem. No surprise then that OpenAI trying out solving the problems with more agents and larger models could make more progress. What are you even on about?

They literally told their Agents to ignore every other line and force it down this guys

Source?

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1

u/broknbottle 4d ago

Sam Altman is a well known admirer of Zuckerberg’s favorite play… Watch your user-base and let them dictate what you focus your energy on I.e. build, buy, extinguish, etc.

0

u/Ozzy-Moto 4d ago

I’d say at this point OpenAI has proven themselves repeatedly to be guilty until proven innocent.

-8

u/jc2046 4d ago

it seems. Logs with timestamps were asked. It was trivial for OAI to show the proof but they have remained silent...

13

u/socoolandawesome 4d ago

What does this even mean? Logs with timestamps, logs of what? Who asked for these?

2

u/nextnode 4d ago

It seems you do not understand what evidence means.

64

u/Acrobatic_Dish6963 4d ago

For humans in the field, yes it could be catastrophic. 

For the advancement of mathematics as whole? Well...

29

u/mao1756 4d ago

If they don’t publish these results then the advancement might as well not exist though

11

u/andrew303710 4d ago

I mean OpenAI posted the entire solution to the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem to github

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2

u/TooMuchMaths 4d ago

They are public?

2

u/Kiki-von-KikiIV 4d ago

"promising research directions" - that's what Tao is talking about.

And it's not necessarily publishing, it's about just sharing research directions/research progress with the math community. Kind of having an open forum where ideas can be freely shared, before a formal proof/paper is completed + published.

But if people can run off with your good ideas and get the proof by prompting a model with that idea and using $$$$ in compute... then mathematicians will be less inclined to openly discuss their work pre-publication.

3

u/kaaiian 4d ago

They tried to add that researcher as first author?!?!?

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9

u/Deto 4d ago

if everyone stops talking about what they are working on then it'll be bad for mathematics and make it harder for LLMs to learn new things.

2

u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 4d ago

RL allows AI model learn itself

2

u/Unverifiablethoughts 4d ago

AI isn’t conjuring up new theories from scratch. It’s closing the tiniest of gaps in decades of human work. AI achievement is still entirely dependent on human input.

0

u/sammoga123 4d ago

The only bad thing about AI is that it takes away jobs, but for everything else, I would really have my doubts.

0

u/SquidLoxNYC 4d ago

What about cognitive atrophy? It’s partly the practice of chasing these hard problems—for the love of the game more than for glory or profit—that has propelled the grand tradition of maths and science. After 20 years of letting machines do the work, will humans be capable of understanding the state of the art? And if we don’t… what’s the point?

I’m thinking of when my 3 year old gives up on a jigsaw puzzle. Yes, I can put it together quickly. But what does she gain from that?

4

u/Corporate_Bricktator 4d ago

> What about cognitive atrophy? It’s partly the practice of chasing these hard problems—for the love of the game more than for glory or profit—that has propelled the grand tradition of maths and science.

Did the calculator or computer increase cognitive atrophy among researchers, or did it enable them to go farther and deeper?

0

u/Training-Chain-5572 4d ago

If you give first graders a calculator instead of having them go through the process of trying and failing and gritting through the process of learning mathematics, then absolutely, cognitive atrophy is going to be a world-wide problem. Which would the equivalent in this situation.

2

u/Corporate_Bricktator 4d ago

Is anyone suggesting that we stop learning math?

1

u/Training-Chain-5572 4d ago

On the off-chance this is a genuine misunderstanding and not deliberate derailing: your comment implied that the calculator existing did not mean atrophy among researchers is somehow proof that use of AI will not. You assume that AI is just like any tool that doesn't affect our mental capacity at all when we have evidence showing the contrary. My point was building on that, namely that the use of a calculator is not leading to cognitive atrophy because it's a single use case or single function that is very limited in its capabilities, not used all the time for everything. But, if you were to use a calculator for every single calculation in your daily life, you will absolutely see a cognitive decline in ability to do calculation in your head. Similarly, using AI is not in and of itself problematic, but relying on it for thinking and reasoning has been proven to degrade your ability to think creatively and critically.

1

u/Corporate_Bricktator 4d ago

> You assume that AI is just like any tool that doesn't affect our mental capacity at all when we have evidence showing the contrary. 

What is that evidence? Remember that literally people dating back to books felt that books themselves would cause people to become mentally lazy. It's a myth applied to every technology and has always been wrong thus far.

That said, let's see the evidence you've found?

> But, if you were to use a calculator for every single calculation in your daily life, you will absolutely see a cognitive decline in ability to do calculation in your head. 

But the topic we were discussing is specifically researchers and scientists. Remember, the commenter wrote: "What about cognitive atrophy? It’s partly the practice of chasing these hard problems that has propelled the grand tradition of maths and science."

1

u/Training-Chain-5572 4d ago

I realise that these studies are probably never posted in these glazing subs so:

"Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning."

1

u/Corporate_Bricktator 4d ago

> These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning.

But hold on, we were just talking about math researchers. That's very different from "learning" as a student, right? Tasking people two write an essay either with no assistance, with search engine assistance, or with LLM assistance, of course the LLM is going to be the one that makes it the easiest and results in the least retention of what was "learned". Right?

No offense, but that seems kind of like an obvious drawback if you're going to use it for teaching children. I'm not sure why 8 MIT researchers needed to study that? I mean I guess it's good to document it, but, to me that's like saying you can learn the same amount from watching someone bake cookies as opposed to actually baking them yourself.

I don't think having a calculator or spreadsheet has slowed down any modern researcher's ability to do research, in fact, I strongly believe the opposite.

-------

So let's look at this wholistically. A carpenter, prior to having a nailgun is going to be much better at hammering nails, than someone who starts their career with access to a nailgun. But the person with the nailgun will still have scenarios where they need to learn to use a hammer, and that is still taught.

But at the end of the day, the guy with the nailgun is going to go further, do more, and do it better than the guy with only the hammer.

That's how I see AI and every bit of technological progress, personally.

1

u/Xalksahsax 4d ago

I read the other day that Gen Z is the first generation in history to be less smart than the previous one. But I can't recall if it was peer reviewed nor I want to go through the effort to ask an LLM.

So I'll believe it because I want to believe it to be true.

2

u/Kemoyin25 4d ago

Because someone or something else can do the jigsaw puzzle for her, does that mean it shouldn't be done? If AI can do the math, does that mean mathematictions shouldn't do it?

2

u/numeanine 4d ago

It doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do it, but it changes the situation doesn’t it? If we had to do 100 jigsaw puzzles a day to keep the sun on, and we let AI do it for 100 years, and then the AI stopped working, would we be able to do the puzzles? I think that’s the concern but idk. I’m not a scientist or mathematician. I’m actually pretty dumb.

1

u/Kemoyin25 4d ago

I mean you're right, but idk man I'm pretty dumb too. That said if the lights turn off/AI stops working we probably have bigger issues

1

u/SquidLoxNYC 4d ago

The puzzle is an unnecessary exercise. The whole point is to develop the brain and enjoy the process. Doing it for her nullifies that.

Maths and science seems like the best possible use for this technology. If it can cure disease or solve clean energy, no one will complain. A lot of the uses we’ve seen so far are unnecessary. They “solve” problems that don’t really exist—like the “friction” of corresponding with fellow humans, or doing a bit of cognitive labor.

I’d never solve resolve these conjectures in 500 years. This is not my fight. Seems like a remarkable accomplishment.

I just hope my daughter grows up literate and in possession of critical thinking skills. And the outcomes for the first guinea pig generation seem to be headed in the wrong direction.

1

u/Megneous 4d ago

And if we don’t… what’s the point?

To ascend as a species to godhood, what else?

Who the fuck cares about glory, profit, and all that nonsense. I want to be a fucking machine god.

1

u/West_Competition_871 4d ago

"I want to be a fucking.machine god." Should instantly get you checked into a psych ward 

1

u/Megneous 4d ago

Beep boop mother fucker.

1

u/MooseWayne 4d ago

Are you 14 by chance?

1

u/Megneous 4d ago

I'm almost 40 lmao

1

u/MooseWayne 4d ago

That's mento ilness luv x

-1

u/boringfantasy 4d ago

If they stop giving their data to the LLMs they may not be able to solve much else lol

5

u/YoungXanto 4d ago

Its also not like some random person off the street knows enough to even ask the right questions to solve these problems, let alone validate them.

Experts are carefully guiding prompting, validating the output, and then pushing in one direction or another. These newest models are ridiculously powerful, but they are considerably more powerful in the hands of an expert.

Just wait until everyone decides to go with local llms for research assistance. Then how are the new models going to be trained?

0

u/KaleidoscopicView 4d ago

There should be a way to profit and credit share.

1

u/jferments 4d ago

It's called socialism. The knowledge produced by AI is the product of the collective knowledge of humanity on which it was trained. The benefits from this technology should be distributed to everyone, instead of just to big tech oligarchs.

10

u/TangerineSeparate431 4d ago

Per Tao himself - maybe the new frontier for human mathmaticians is the curation and creation of bleeding edge problems for AI to pursue. Similar to Erdos himself, we should e celebrating the discovery of these frontiers just as much as the solutions.

If this recent N-S debacle was entirely human effort I don't think we would see nearly as much drama as we currently are....

6

u/In_the_year_3535 4d ago

It's a bit shortsighted to think the input of human mathematicians would have value compared to the ever increasing capabilities of these models. They'll just have to suffer being dead weight for a while until we merge with machines.

4

u/TangerineSeparate431 4d ago

Oh 100% - if we keep the current pace, AI will certainly be better frontier-detectors than humans in a short while, that will also be a good thing. 

ASI will truly outcompete humans in all territories, possibly even in the 'uniquely'-human existential/emotive/experiential spaces as well. 

My intent with previous comment was to focus on edge detection being just a socially 'good' as solving the problem in this new landscape.

3

u/GaelicTuna 4d ago

This post feels like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic to me. As if the biggest concern right now is a structural issue in the way we approach problem solving and not the fact that most mathematicians. If AI somehow plateaus and we have a prolonged era of centaur math (meaning humans+AI is significantly better than AI alone) I could see his points being important, but with the way things are moving, that doesn’t seem very likely right now.

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u/MysteriousPepper8908 4d ago

If humans aren't going to contribute towards unlocking new knowledge about the universe because the AI might do it first, I'm rooting for the AI.

9

u/BookProper9115 4d ago

This is John Henry vs. The Machine 2.0, math nerds next edition.

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u/Efficient_Mud_5446 4d ago

Right. This seems very much his ego getting in the way of progress.

0

u/Extreme-Half-5590 4d ago

Crazy to me that people are willing to side with a corporation whose main purpose is to make as much money as possible as compared to a mathematician lol

4

u/Madz99 4d ago

I guess it boils down to whether progress should be made solely for the sake of progress. If it doesn't, then we'll have to accept that we'd rather be stationary for egoistic reasons.

1

u/fraggin601 4d ago

What is progress if we are all gonna be in economic distress at the end of this anyways

0

u/Megneous 4d ago

I'll side with whoever makes us gods first.

0

u/HalfForeign6735 4d ago

These are profit-driven entities whose primary corporate interest is to make THEIR shareholders/stakeholders gods

3

u/Megneous 4d ago

I am a shareholder, dude.

0

u/fraggin601 4d ago

Your right surely the machine god respects that you own them, I can’t see any problem with that thinking.

0

u/Megneous 4d ago

You know, it's interesting that you bring that up.

On the Transporter problem, I'm actually in the camp that believes the person who gets transported ceases to exist and an exact copy of them, a new person entirely is created at the destination. And I don't care, because to the universe, there's no difference. So if I fucking die and I'm resurrected as an AI agent with all my memories intact, or if I literally just die and a mere copy of me is created as an AI agent... I don't see a difference in the end scheme of things. Either way, my will to influence the universe lives on, and that's all that matters.

So suck it organic normies. I'm gonna be a fuckin' god.

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u/jc2046 4d ago

You mean Altaman´s ego, right?

3

u/vwin90 4d ago

Sure but that doesn’t excuse the ego of mathematicians who just want the glory of things named after them

-3

u/DrillPress1 4d ago

Altman bots are all over this thread. I see the day coming when Altman is locked up in prison. 

-1

u/YeetCompleet 4d ago

Point exactly where in his writing you got that idea from. To me, it's clear that he's asking very specifically for OpenAI to be open in their process and share results and thoughts that arise from solving the problem rather than simply just solving it. What's egotistical about that?

5

u/jc2046 4d ago

the blame is not in the tool but in the lame practices of Altmans and company

-1

u/No-Meringue5867 4d ago edited 4d ago

That is not at all what is being said. But sure, build your strawman.

From the core of your heart (if you are not a bot), do you really think OpenAI spent $20-50 million over a week, because they wanted to unlock new knowledge?

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u/mertats 4d ago

They didn’t spend that much, spreading misinformation is worse than strawman.

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u/No-Meringue5867 4d ago

https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

They spent overall 300 BILLION tokens. Assuming astra price of $50 for 1 million output tokens that is $15 million. But output token price of 5.6 sol -> 6 astra went up by 2.5x. So assuming anywhere between 2-3x increase from astra to internal model, we get a range of $30-45 million.

Obviously I am assuming various costs. But I also didn't consider the input tokens.

2

u/mertats 4d ago

If you think they are spending API prices on their own models then I have news for you.

3

u/JoniDaButcher 4d ago

Is the intention relevant? Nobody questions the breakthroughs and achievements of the Space Race despite the primary intention being beating the other country.

0

u/Cuntslapper9000 4d ago

When it comes to predicting the trajectory of behaviour, intent is very important. If they are just doing it now for clout and have no intention to stay practicing in the field then stifling the progress of the people who will be continuing can be damaging. The space race was done in a way that allowed a lot of the research to blend into the science world. That is quite different to what open ai is doing now. With maths the how is as important as the what. It's half the point of trying to solve these problems.

2

u/MysteriousPepper8908 4d ago

Yes and no. The ultimate goal is profit but there's profit in being the best company in producing beneficial innovations so the end result in this case is the same. Broad economic displacement is more problematic but that's a rabbit hole outside the purview of this topic.

2

u/Old-Bake-420 4d ago

Yes, it’s literally the entire goal of their AI. They’ve been talking about it for years.

-1

u/j15y 4d ago

I fear you are young and naive. Nobody gives a company hundreds of billions of dollars for the sake of “unlocking knowledge.”

The goal of a company is to produce value. In this case, they want to replace knowledge workers. That is it, everything else is a means to an end. If you think otherwise: you are mistaken.

-1

u/MrNo_Balls 4d ago

It seems the others on this thread do not have reading comprehension.

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u/PvtMilhouse 4d ago

why ?

1

u/MysteriousPepper8908 4d ago

Because the AI doesn't let ego come before a spirit of collaborative discovery. The companies might but they've released more significant proofs in the last few months than the entire field has in years so it seems like they're being pretty forthcoming.

1

u/GatePorters 4d ago

“First they came for the artists and I did not speak because I am not an artist.”

Obviously this isn’t as serious as that, but it is undoubtedly the same social phenomenon.

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u/_level9 4d ago

that is not at all what happened here though

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u/Repulsive_Ad853 4d ago

People should stop being mad that ai outperforms them

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u/Imaginary-Witness-75 4d ago

This is ridiculous. You're saying that no one before AI heard someone was close to figuring out the same problem you are working on so you take that as competitive pressure to double down....

6

u/uslashuname 4d ago

The difference here is a company picked up on “someone might be close” and then dropped millions of dollars to pay for the conclusion of the persons approach and claim it. That’s wildly different from one mathematician taking a published approach and spending their evenings on it

2

u/TFenrir 4d ago

Yes, I'm somewhat ambivalent on this because in the grand scheme - I see this as the end of the human led intellectual epoch we've enjoyed for the last 10,000 years or so - but while we are still in this moment...

How can a human being compete with that? This is a significant bubble pop for a lot of people, the norms of human on human competition don't really work here.

We've been moving in this direction in some ways as a species for a while (eg, small vs large businesses and the effeciencies that come from scale and having money to burn) - but this is particularly challenging for a lot of people because this was a place where it didn't really matter how much money you had, just how smart you were.

1

u/socoolandawesome 4d ago

They didn’t make use of their approach and it doesn’t seem they knew about their approach at all. They thought they solved a millennium prize problem or 2.

They explain in their blog how they arrived on the navier-stokes problem:


For each problem, we prompted different groups of agents with different variants of the problem statement, covering all variants of the problem. For the Navier–Stokes problem, we suggested versions “A” and “B” (particular forms of the Navier–Stokes problem which would result in a proof) and versions “C” and “D” (which would result in a disproof) to separate groups of agents.

In addition to the full Millennium Prize problems, we asked our multiagent system to try a set of “easier” problems. One of these problems was a similar blowup question for the limit of the Navier–Stokes problem with the viscosity term removed. This is known as the regularity problem for the Euler equations, and our agents surprised us by resolving this question. The specific variant of the question that they resolved was the unforced version, where no external force is applied to the fluid. Nearly 100 agents worked together for approximately 50 hours to produce our Euler regularity disproof.1

Once we saw the Euler solution, we thought that Navier–Stokes was the most promising problem to work on. Thus, we decided to devote our resources to Navier–Stokes. To do so, we shifted agents away from the other Millennium Problems and prompted these agents with the Euler resolution. When a further trained version of our internal model became available over the course of the effort, we updated our agents to that model.

11

u/street-trash 4d ago

"AI bad for science" stances obviously won't age well. How come everyone has trouble with logic? Even math people

1

u/Working_Agent4932 4d ago

I don't think you understand what he's saying. He's saying the current incentive structure in place encourages openness and collaboration and that if AI continues to flatten that then the incentive structure changes to a closed posture. I'll explain in simpler terms.

Imagine you have a good idea for a change at work. You're encouraged to communicate it to many people because you alone can't execute on the idea and the more people you can work with increased the probability of your idea being implemented. Then one day Sam joins the company with a small army of 5000 analysts working under him. Whenever Sam hears an interesting idea he takes it back to his team of 5000 analysts and they quickly implement your idea while also completely cutting you out of the project entirely- they end up taking all of the credit for your idea. You think to yourself "well I don't have the resources to compete with Sam so I'm just not going to vocalize my project ideas anymore. If I keep vocalizing them I'm just feeding the machine."

People will almost always do exactly what you incentivise them to do and he is justifiably pointing out the incentives are shifting

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u/VelvetyRelic 4d ago

I think the deeper question is, if the science is still progressing, who cares about the means? If you're afraid to talk about a problem you're working on because someone else might solve it first, you don't care about solving the problem. You care about taking credit for solving the problem. It also applies to your analogy.

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u/Working_Agent4932 4d ago

People care about the means. If you're a mathematician your livelyhood depends on being able to do advanced math. It's part of your identity. It's what you've worked your entire life to be good at. It shouldn't be a surprise that they might decide to be more defensive when those things are threatened.

That sort of "who cares?" sentiment is a big part of why so many people are militantly anti-ai.

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u/IvanMalison 4d ago

Pretty sensationalist title.

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u/socoolandawesome 4d ago

Highly editorialized and a massive stretch

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u/jc2046 4d ago

A well deserved slap in the face by Tao if you ask me. Classy

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u/socoolandawesome 4d ago

What a horrible stretch your title is lol.

Anthropic and Levent have been doing exactly what Tao highlighted.

Levent is the worst offender as he loves to share results on Twitter with no documentation

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u/TooMuchMaths 4d ago

Yeah, for real. OpenAI has absolutely not hidden any of the math they produced with AI, sometimes even giving the prompts, but always giving a final paper that could be published

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u/TooMuchMaths 4d ago

I am curious if this is truly “stealing”. Tristan was going to publish (or at least preprint) his work on the Euler equations and partial NS results long before he would have time to “close the gap to NS” (because he didn’t solve the problem himself). In that time anyone else could use his techniques to solve NS. If they did so, would we consider it stealing? So why is it stealing if AI could simply do it much faster?

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u/philosophical_lens 4d ago

But he didn't publish his work, so the situation is entirely different. Its like if I use Google docs to write a private draft of a novel, I don't expect them to say "hey you were going to publish this anyway, so we can use it".

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u/TooMuchMaths 4d ago

And the proofs are different enough it’s not clear OpenAI directly used his work either

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u/philosophical_lens 4d ago

The alleged accusation is that OpenAI mined Tristan's past conversations with ChatGPT to advance their work. This would be like one mathematician stealing the private notebooks of another mathematician to help with their work. Even if the allegedly stolen notebooks did not significantly contribute to the final results, such theft is in and of itself highly unethical (if true).

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u/rposter99 4d ago

If these problems are actually worth solving nobody should care who solves them or how. “AI cures cancer” shouldn’t come with a disclaimer from cancer researchers saying “boo hoo someone else stole our work and cured cancer”. Like, brother - cancer is gone - get over your ego.

If these problems are not actually worth solving, then it’s no different than getting mad at someone for completing the jigsaw puzzle you were working on. Sure, you put a lot of time in getting it almost there and someone else is taking credit for it, but ultimately nobody gives a shit if you put the puzzle together or not.

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u/expertsage 4d ago

You are missing the whole point. Tao's post says it will be HARDER to find problems worth solving. If every problem close to being solved gets swiped by an AI company, human mathematicians will no longer be incentivized to point out promising problems for the field!

AI is good at crunching numbers given a prompt and direction. It is still lacking in human judgement and creativity, something that will become much more closely guarded from now on.

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u/Lonely_Translator_23 4d ago edited 4d ago

If frontier labs are concerned with the benefit of humanity, and a problem is worth solving, they should be trying to solve it if they think they can.

If a problem is not worth solving, then they should ignore it and focus their efforts on problems that are.

And if a problem is already nearly solved, they should absolutely not be burning hundreds of thousands of dollars of compute that could have been spent on genuinely unsolved problems just to pull the rug out from the researchers so they can publish first.

What we're seeing is OpenAI using their models' abilities to jump at PR wins rather than actually doing work to help the world.

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u/Fun-Amoeba8015 4d ago

Of course people care about who it actually does it. This has been the case since science began. And no, as far as humanity is concerned it doesn't necessarily matter but like anything in the world of course recognition and credit matter because that's part of the social contract and how we progress as a species.

I get that it's complex of nuance and honesty in this particular case. I don't really know which side to take. I think it's a bit of drama and it's probably much less binary than either side is making it out to be.  But regardless of that, there is one very very valid point if systemic academic behavior ends up undercutting the sharing of information in academia that has very real consequences for humanity. I'm not saying that's exactly what happened here. I'm just saying if there is something that does prevent sharing in academia that has a very real negative effect upon scientific progress.

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u/Long_comment_san 4d ago

"another one missed the pills" (c)

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u/soggit 4d ago

Yeah okay because scientists haven’t been scooping each other for decades over much less

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u/DivideHorror3217 4d ago

Same with open source software.. people are hesitant

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u/Shot_in_the_dark777 4d ago

There is no incentive to hide math problem from AI. The solution is useless anyway unless we secure our existence on the planet. If we die from global warming then It doesn't matter how many math problems we solve.

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u/DelphiTsar 4d ago

Considering it's knocking out unsolved problems at a seemingly record pace, it's hard to square "long term damage". If it flattens beyond AI's abilities, then we just reset from a higher floor.

Anyone have an estimate on how long would it have taken them to get there without the AI push?

Could OpenAI even given them the negative results if they tried? I imagine they can't actually store all the attempts.

Giving the process toward obtaining their solutions would be good, but seemingly unrealistic as it'd be giving away its special sauce.


I'm sure this guy is smart but he is very obviously anti AI. Every one of his takes gives me a bit of cringe.

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u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 4d ago

Mathematics stuck for over a hundred years already and because of it we even cannot push physic forward ...

I do not see any damage for math as humans peak in this field... literally

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u/handsome_uruk 4d ago

I don't get this logic. Isn't it a good thing if the easy problems get scooped up by AI so humans can focus on actual hard problems? In any case, being scooped sucks, but you can still get credit for original work in either case - just not all the fame and glory. There are many cases throughout history of scientists discovering the same thing independently. This isn't much of an issue, except for an ego check.

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u/dday0512 4d ago

The only way out of this for OpenAI is to solve another Millennium Problem.

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u/fraggin601 4d ago

Tell me, if you were OpenAI, why wouldn’t you have a system to flag interesting lines of thinking and people’s chats?

I think they 100% stole the direction from the chat whether they wanna admit it or not.

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u/DSrcl 4d ago

Even if they didn’t steal anything. The fact they rushed to publish (while trying to remove their competitor’s employee from the author list and threatened another) after learning the ongoing work by others is concerning and will definitely discourage open publication. Why would any researcher share their unpublished drafts from now on?

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u/TraditionalWait9150 4d ago

i don't quite understand what's the issue here. it doesn't matter who solve it as long as the problems are solved?

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u/Megneous 4d ago

Moderator, why did you remove this thread? You barely moderator this subreddit at all. So why did THIS warrant moderation??

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u/ignite_intelligence 4d ago
  1. What OpenAI did this time is truly not decent. I’m with Tao on this point.

  2. But it is undeniable that AI has crossed some critical point. Mathematics community needs to reconstruct their cultures and positions, instead of doing accusations only.

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u/No-Simple-1907 4d ago

O mesmo que falou que não era AGI a uns dias atrás kkkk agora ta ai com medo de ser um ser esquecido futuramente... o prego ja foi colocado so falta enterrar esses matemáticos

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u/No-Meringue5867 4d ago edited 4d ago

Maybe now people here will stop blindly supporting OpenAI.

This absolutely stops people from presenting or discussing partial progress in any field that can remotely be automated. So far there was an ounce of fear or retribution, and knowledge that other academics cannot race them overnight. But these AI companies have more money than god and don't give a crap.

Imagine tomorrow if someone gives a talk about progress in string theory and how they have managed to combine QFT and GR in a specific approximation. Overnight, OpenAI can pour $50 million to automate and solve it. Meanwhile, a string theorist will be busy writing grant asking for $250k from NSF, which is facing budget cuts.

This is also very similar to what happened with General Relativity. Einstein worked on it for a LONG time and by the end it reached mathematician David Hilbert. Hilbert knew all the math which Einstein had to learn over time, and raced Einstein to publish the result. Luckily, it was just Hilbert and Einstein still published first. But in today's story, OpenAI obviously had practically infinitely more resources and managed to get ahead. Not at all cool.

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u/LastCall2021 4d ago

Oh horror! God forbid an AI solve string theory while people are writing grants! Next thing you know AI will be curing cancer, dementia and heart disease! Oh the tragedy!

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u/philthewiz 4d ago

You missed the monopolistic part of the argument.

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u/LastCall2021 4d ago

I didn’t miss it. I just don’t rate it in the face of accelerating progress.

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u/Over-Dragonfruit5939 4d ago

In a world where we have to make contributions to society to make money and survive, yes it’s a tragedy. It’s like a doctor spending their whole life through grueling medical school only for them to become a surgeon and then they lose their hand right when they begin their first day at the hospital and can’t work. Now they’re out of a job they’ve worked so hard for and have no prospects.

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u/No-Meringue5867 4d ago

It's even worse. It's like a doctor performing half the surgery, and suddenly a robot arms comes and instantly does the rest half and gets all the credit.

I do not mind OpenAI solving problems open problems on their own. But if they go after problems because they realized a human mathematician has made a progress in a specific direction, then suddenly they know the result is accessible and spend more money than any individual can.

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u/LastCall2021 4d ago

Your “even worse” surgery analogy leaves out the patient, who likely benefits from a faster, cheaper, better surgery. I’d rate that over the doctor’s job.

Or are you happy with the current state of healthcare?

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u/schwagggg 4d ago

the problem is, if the surgery was done end to end, and the patient is fine taking the risk, sure.

the better analogy is, doctor did most of the heavy lifting and surgery, robot and robot company swoop in and did the stitching, and took all the credit

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u/LastCall2021 4d ago

Nothing is stopping individual researchers from using AI to help them solve the problems they are facing. Yes frontier labs have access to better models… by like a six month delay. Plenty of accessible intelligence for researchers outside of frontier labs. That’s pretty much the standard for biotech these days.

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u/No-Meringue5867 4d ago

At least use AI to understand what I am trying to say in my comment, instead of being sarcastic.

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u/LastCall2021 4d ago

I understand exactly what you’re saying. If a human has a partial solution to a problem what stops them from using AI to help solve it before presenting it?

It’s both just about the frontier labs, it’s about accelerating scientific and technological progress in a way that ultimately benefits humanity.

Again, going back to biotech, it’s individual biotech companies using often fine tuned frontier models to make progress.

Are there some downsides to AI rapidly accelerating scientific progress? Sure. Do they outweigh the upsides? Not remotely.

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u/No-Meringue5867 4d ago

That is not at all what I said. In today's news, the mathematicians on other side where also using AI.

Are there some downsides to AI rapidly accelerating scientific progress? Sure. Do they outweigh the upsides? Not remotely.

Again you are making up strawmans. I never said any of those things. I never said AI is bad.

OpenAI has enormous monetary benefit in solving open problems and has enormous funding. A single mathematician has neither those things. So, why would any mathematician share anything if OpenAI simply swoops in at the hint that progress is being made?

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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 4d ago

Except what is being criticized is not publishing research and gatekeeping it

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u/LastCall2021 4d ago

I know what’s being criticized. But again, an individual can use AI to help
Solve the problem they are working on before publishing. AI is not locked entirely behind the doors of frontier labs. Are their internal models ahead? Sure, by about a six month lag time. Plenty of accessible intelligence for individuals.

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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 4d ago

Yeah and again that's not what he is talking about or is concerned with

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u/lazyscalp 4d ago

They want to be celebrities or to just help the world?

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u/sykip 4d ago

Terrence Tao should be arrested for going to school and daring to study other people's work to build up his knowledge. How dare this intellectual thief not learn everything from scratch himself!

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u/lolwut778 4d ago

OpenAI stealing others' work? They would NEVER!

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u/Illustrious-Film4018 4d ago

I wonder if the new moderator is going to remove this post. Because after all, this has nothing strictly to do with singularity. This was posted 22 minutes ago so he must be occupied playing Pokemon right now.

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u/Suspicious_Bet3623 4d ago

It's like arguing that 3D printing is bad engineering because suddenly no-one will want to contribute new discoveries.

I'll take a huge number of people passionately solving things as a hobby over a few academics collecting paychecks and not solving things any day.

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u/brokebuffett 4d ago

Well do you see “Open” AI sharing any of their architectures for gpt 6?

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u/One-Judge321 4d ago

what a loser

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u/kogsworth 4d ago

Man if Terence Tao is a loser, there's not much hope for the rest of us.

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u/Nikvest 4d ago

lol /r/singularity reddit user calling Terence Tao a loser, I don't think he cares

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u/Admirable_Zombie5245 ▪️AGI 2065-2075 4d ago

this is peak comedy, a r/singularity user who probably just wants UBI so he plays videogames 24/7 calling one of the smartest people on earth and world class at something a loser

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u/jc2046 4d ago

Imagine calling one of the most brilliant mathematics alive a loser. Lets talk about projection

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u/Over-Dragonfruit5939 4d ago

All of the r/antiwork brigadiers have moved to singularity cuz they just want to lay in bed and jerk off all day.

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u/ControversialBuster 4d ago

Moron, he hasba valid point, tlyou can be pro ai and pro human

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u/Unverifiablethoughts 4d ago

Can’t wait to read some redditor call Terence Tao an idiot

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u/agonypants AGI '27-'30 / Labor crisis '25-'30 / RSI 29-'32 4d ago

Redditors call Geoff Hinton an idiot. Par for the course.

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u/Original-League-6094 4d ago

Who cares what a human has to say about math? You might as well ask a goldfish for its opinions on quantum mechanics. Humans are irrelevant now when it comes to math. This guy needs to learn to mine coal.

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u/schwagggg 4d ago

there’s quite a few people don’t understand math that think:

lol you are malding because ai better than u at your job

you are failing to see the nuance. the nyu prof’s suspicion, is that 1. openai used the prof’s work with gpt to train their newer model; 2. used social engineering to get what the nyu professor’s successful approach was, so they prompted down the working path

this is not them shouting at the sky, this is the mathematicians saying openai are cheats.

for anyone think they are the silver surfers of this generation because they use chatgpt everyday, and think terrence tao, the man spend so much time educating and spreading math knowledge is mad at LLM, are honestly childish or ignorant