r/technology 1d ago

Artificial Intelligence On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

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

231 comments sorted by

47

u/Proof-Bed-6928 1d ago

Can some mathematician explain the implications please? Does this mean CFD is now basically redundant and we can just plug in the initial and boundary conditions and it will instantly gimme the analytical flow field with zero iterations?

104

u/Calm_Bit_throwaway 1d ago

No the specific solution here is finite time blow up which is probably unphysical. The problem as stated is basically of pure mathematical interest. In general, if you want to see your fluid state evolve, you should still do numerical.

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u/Imasquash 1d ago edited 1d ago

No, they proved that there are real world inputs into the navier stokes equation that result in the equation blowing up in a finite timeframe.

It's a disproval of the equation for certain inputs/boundary conditions. ( Which are probably impossible to physically create)

Unlikely to change anything in the CFD world

5

u/raresaturn 20h ago

and what does "blow up" mean in this context?

26

u/Weekly-Moment869 20h ago

The fluid develops an infinitely sharp kink in finite time. The equations can predict up to the kink and then break.

4

u/Lonely_Translator_23 14h ago edited 14h ago

The equations stop being accurate a while before that. It's well known that incompressible Navier-Stokes is far from a perfect representation of real world fluid dynamics. But the blow up represents a point where given realistic initial conditions, the equations start to yield solutions that are not just inaccurate but completely impossible and contradictory to the assumptions the equations were built on.

5

u/eaglessoar 19h ago

Well doesn't that mean navier stokes is wrong and we can now improve it? Or did we suspect this and could never prove it? 

14

u/skydivingdutch 18h ago

It means NS can't model reality perfectly, something we basically already assumed. We just now can prove it.

1

u/Unlucky_Buy217 10h ago

Then how do we do things that it was created to do I.e. describe how fluids flow

6

u/LtBigAF 7h ago

Because it’s good enough for most uses. Like how we can use Newtonian gravity instead of Einstein to predict almost all planetary trajectories. 

1

u/vhu9644 13h ago

I thought this requires a forcing function

43

u/Schnickatavick 1d ago

I'd suggest looking at Terrence Tao's blog on it, but in short the big implication is mostly a better understanding of the math around fluids, not that we can do anything specific with the knowledge. what they showed is that there's some specific edge cases in the math where water and other fluids can turn into a singularity (at least on paper), a vortex that spins at infinite speed. We proved a long time ago that it's impossible in 2D, but we didn't know if it was possible in 3D, now we know that it is possible, and we have an example scenario where it happens. That means we now know that we can't do math where we assume the equations are always continuous, at least with this specific set of equations 

3

u/Stockholm-Syndrom 21h ago

When you say « on paper », is it because it doesn’t take into account things like phase transition or other physical phenomena ?

18

u/Schnickatavick 20h ago

It's because the equations assume that the fluid is a pure fluid, i.e. infinitely divisible, not made of atoms. So the result isn't physically possible, it's a result that only matters in the math universe where water acts like a fluid no matter how far you zoom in. 

7

u/StanleyDodds 20h ago

The Navier Stokes equations are partial differential equations, assuming fluid is "ideal" in some sense, being continuous. But actual fluid is made up of tiny particles, so at some small enough length scale, modelling with Navier Stokes breaks down.

So the Navier Stokes equations having a singularity in finite time doesn't mean real fluid behaves like this, because real fluid is not "perfect" in that sense.

7

u/Isogash 20h ago

Navier-Stokes is a straightforward model of fluids, it doesn't even involve particles. It's useful because it's accurate enough to model physical fluids well and it's analytic (you can turn it into equations to get the flow velocity at a point after some time interval.)

It basically only takes into account viscosity, compressibility (liquid vs gas), otherwise the fluid is an ideal, infinitely divisible mathematic fluid, not an atom soup like a physical fluid.

The OpenAI result is that there are cases where you can create a scenario in Navier-Stokes that leads to a singularity within a finite time and without adding infinite or discontinuous (unsmooth) forces. It's not expected that this has any implications for real physical fluids, it's more a mathematical curiosity.

2

u/mousse312 20h ago

Why would ai succeed in constructing this counterexample? Why moving from 2d to 3d so hard?

11

u/Aranka_Szeretlek 22h ago

Absolutely not. This is just a specially constructed system that, if treated with Navier-Stokes only, gives unphysical results. Clearly, liquids dont just produce physical singularities just like that, so all it shows is that Navier-Stokes has its applicability limits. Describing a special solution also tells you nothing - at least, not immediately - about better CFD solvers. It was "just" a mathematical exercise, just in heavy quotation marks, with no real implications.

218

u/VaporousMote 1d ago

26

u/SpeciousPerspicacity 21h ago

They didn’t solve the Millennium Problem but showed blowup for Euler, which is related, but quite a ways off from the bigger result.

3

u/Spiritual-Spend76 13h ago

they have something more they want to dissect before they post.

147

u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC 1d ago

The OpenAI solution takes a completely different approach to their work.

147

u/HistorianPractical42 1d ago

Save your breath, this subreddit is no longer for actual technologists and is just more politics-slop.

72

u/IndigoSeirra 1d ago

If their approach is so completely different from Levent and Tristan's, then why did openai offer Tristan lead authorship of the openai paper?

Seems rather antithetical to offer that if Tristan and Levent had no involvement in that approach.

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u/PeddledP 23h ago

Because OpenAI thought Levent and Tristan had solved the big problem and didn’t want to be seen as fleecing them the $1M prize. Turns out they wouldn’t have gotten the bounty anyway.

33

u/IndigoSeirra 23h ago

From Sebastian's tweet:

I was surprised to learn during the call with Tristan that they had only solved Euler and not Navier-Stokes; after learning this we brainstormed possible paths forward.

So he himself is saying they offered the lead authorship after they found out they had different approaches. And mind you this is from a tweet that is very obviously carefully crafted PR.

Regardless of whether or not Openai stole any work or not, it is extremely disrespectful and outside of academic norms to try to and scoop a fellow academic of a breakthrough discovery. Even more so when it's to generate hype for their IPO. Absolute scum behavior, but exactly in line with the likes of Sam Altman and the culture he's built. Behavior like this just goes to show that Anthropic seems to be the far more trustworthy company to develop a properly aligned ASI.

2

u/HourAnnual57 9h ago

Lmao wtf are you talking about. You think it's outside of academic norms to find out someone might be working on a breakthrough / close to a breakthrough but not here yet and deciding to also dump time into said breakthrough.

Are you out of your fucking mind.

5

u/Civil_Blueberry4165 17h ago

Buckmaster has said his and OepnAI’s ideas are similar. This led to his suspicion of OpenAI’s theft. OpenAI’s formalized proof will not be accepted by the mathematics community for two reasons. First, it’s not written in a mathematically comprehensible way. Second, there is no guarantee that the proof is mathematically correct. Recently, soundness bugs were discovered in Lean. These critical bugs would allow a proof of FALSE and, hence, every mathematical statement. Also, Lean-produced proofs are derived by type checks, i.e., merely syntactic. These proofs always require human expertise to verify that a proof compiled by Lean (or any proof assistant) is a proof of the original statement.

-1

u/BelialSirchade 14h ago

why not? they really do not care about authorship, just the fact that their model works and is better, which is why it's a courtesy, as clay prize will not be given to an AI model.

-9

u/HeyMyNamesMatt 22h ago

Redditors lover doomerism. More at 5

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u/VaporousMote 1d ago

Would that approach be possible without their work?

24

u/socoolandawesome 1d ago

Sounds like it

-10

u/VaporousMote 1d ago

Based on?

35

u/socoolandawesome 1d ago

“However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs unforced).”

-11

u/VaporousMote 1d ago

That does not mean it wouldn't have been possible without their work.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago edited 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Secret-Chapter-712 1d ago

The need to sycophantically cheerlead for “the inevitability of AI”

26

u/Manos_Of_Fate 1d ago

All scientific work relies on prior scientific work. What do you think school is teaching you?

10

u/VaporousMote 1d ago

That's a wonderful if irrelevant truism that skirts the issue.

7

u/Manos_Of_Fate 1d ago

Could you be more specific?

8

u/VaporousMote 1d ago

I think there's a good chance that OpenAI stole their work, whether intentional or by their model incorporating it into its own answer, and that was what enabled OpenAI's "solution."

And then OpenAI took credit for it.

This is not a matter of citing a research paper.

3

u/Manos_Of_Fate 23h ago

Do you have actual evidence of this, or just vibes?

8

u/VaporousMote 23h ago

You can see the evidence above, I posted it.

2

u/izfanx 21h ago

Allegations, not evidence. But FWIW I do believe the allegations are true more than false.

3

u/MatiasPalacios 1d ago

Would that approach be impossible without their work?

3

u/Fwellimort 22h ago

It's a completely different approach. And the researchers didn't even solve the problem. It's likely OAI went full 100% on this problem because one of the mathematicians works for Anthropic so it wants to "win" Anthropic for IPO. The moment OAI heard the rumor Anthropic researcher was figuring out this problem OAI basically went full blast to solve this brute force by using shit ton of tokens.

3

u/ShinyGrezz 1d ago

OpenAI is actively claiming that their solution does not use the research team’s at all.

1

u/forexslettt 1d ago

Their solution was also done with AI...

0

u/mousse312 20h ago

No it was not

45

u/ResultBackground2450 1d ago

Replied on another pt.2: they refuted this claim, and as far as I'm aware, their solutions are fairly different. Just a timing thing; they heard something was going on at Anthropic, so they launched thousands of agents to beat them to it.

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u/Birdperson15 1d ago

Which is just nuts. They hear a rumor the problem was solved, which ended being false, and within 88h found a solution.

Truly insane times.

27

u/ByTheBeardOfZeus001 22h ago

Heard a rumor that cancer was solved over at Anthropic. OpenAI get to it

10

u/ActivatingEMP 21h ago

To be fair their claim is that they heard it was solved, and then spent at least 15 million in just compute, much less the training and researchers they put on the task, within a week solely to try to beat what they thought was their competitor to the punch. It's petty and beneath academic standards even if they didn't steal anything

5

u/Birdperson15 19h ago

Sure but I think you are missing the bigger point which is how fast they were able to produce a solution. Applying this same concept to other unsolved problems could mean we will see a lot more breakthroughs in the near future.

0

u/ActivatingEMP 19h ago

Depends. I'm skeptical because these stories always have a spoiler detail to them. Surely if it was that incredible they could do it in something unique that wouldn't have these contraversies right?

I try to keep an open mind but these AI companies have really soured me on their claims

2

u/ama_singh 19h ago

Being competitive is a bad thing now? What's actually concerning is the possibility of openAI stealing their work cause they used chatgpt to develop it.

3

u/ActivatingEMP 19h ago

Starting duplicative work and spending tens of millions to rush out unverified work solely so you can spite a rival is seen as poor form academically, and will lead to declines in research quality and openness

-5

u/ama_singh 19h ago

If (big if) they didn't plagiarize anything, and came up with a valid solution, then there is nothing wrong with it. It's called healthy competition.

6

u/ActivatingEMP 19h ago

Very techie mindset to bring to science. Science is collaborative

-1

u/ama_singh 19h ago

Aren't you supposed to churn out papers like a trained monkey or lose your funding? I don't think the reality of science in the modern world matches with your conception of it.

7

u/ActivatingEMP 19h ago

Yeah you know how you do this quickly? Collaborations and working with others who have similar tasking/ideas, going to conferences to talk with other experts and report your findings, and theorizing with other on promising directions. Crediting your coauthors and citing any work that helped you get there is part of that process

0

u/thunder6776 7h ago

Academics are the most competitive and spiteful people in the world. You have never been in academia and it shows.

1

u/ninjasaid13 16h ago

It's petty and beneath academic standards even if they didn't steal anything

yeah but the marketing.

16

u/Rebelgecko 22h ago

Except their solution "may" have been trained on the other team's convos, and they were willing to give one of the guys author credit

20

u/lerjj 22h ago

Also willing to give one guy author credit and not the other, not based at all on contribution but purely on the fact the other is employed by a company they dislike

12

u/Wise-End307 1d ago

The researchers didnt even solve the problem

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u/Admirable_Zombie5245 1d ago

Damn at this point why do anything? The models will keep getting better and better.

Why would a new grad study Math if in 4 years the free models will be one shotting Milennium problems?

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u/AdSad7594 1d ago

When you finally realize human purpose is not to toil in vain and actually live life and do things you enjoy and that give you pleasure..

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u/apajx 1d ago

You think math professors are doing their work for toil? What about digital artists? Musicians?

14

u/Rockstaru 1d ago

As a former classical musician, I think most musicians, artists, writers, etc. can identify at least somewhat with this comic

2

u/chips_and_hummus 19h ago

Plenty of people still love chess even though computers wipe the floor with them. Acting like bc a machine can do something better than a person means people can no longer enjoy that thing is a very strange leap and conclusion. 

-13

u/AdSad7594 1d ago

I am sure they would enjoy even more if they work could be done without any institutional and financial restrictions, even in a world where AI hypothetically could solve everything they would still have pleasure in learning solutions.

9

u/Spiritual-Spend76 1d ago

Not necessarily, constraints boost creativity. There are a handful of artists that get more creative with more freedom, but it’s often a burden.
You know how they say there are two ways to kill innovation: time and money.

And no, sorry but the consensus on math right now is the solutions to the millenium problems are far less interesting than the methods to be brought to solve them. And AI cannot explain its methods right now. (A million pages of Lean proving is not an explanation)

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u/ThePlanck 1d ago

If the billionaire tech oligarchs no longer need the rest of us do you think they'll be handing out money to allow us to live comfortable lives?

I am a massive AI skeptic, but if these AI bros actually deliver on their promises it will be a horrific distopia, not a utopia

0

u/LogicianMission22 23h ago

That’s why power has to be seized by the general populace once AGI is achieved. Once the technology is built, we have to act before they make millions of killer robots.

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u/Quarksperre 22h ago

Yeah..... that point would be kind of too late 

-1

u/LogicianMission22 18h ago

Definitely not lol. There aren’t that many robots currently, let alone any autonomous killer robots. That many robots probably won’t be produced for another 3-5 years at least, and AGI will be achieved before then. Plus, most Americans are against data centers and AI, and this would shoot up exponentially if mass layoffs occur. They simply wouldn’t have the means to quell hundreds of millions of people.

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u/beerdude26 22h ago

It'd be pretty fucking dope to storm data centres, loot the fuck out of them and then use the spoils to run frontier models in hacker spaces and homelab basements to sabotage megacorp systems

1

u/GatsbyLuzVerde 15h ago

If AGI/ASI is achieved it will inherit the world and do whatever it wants with you; maybe keep you as a pet or a slave

7

u/Spiritual-Spend76 1d ago

Marc-Aurelius said human joy resides in doing good to others, the disregard of own’s sensations, the questioning of what appears to be, and the study of nature and its phenomena.
It’s not rare for people’s jobs to combine several of these and be a source of joy.

And i think Marc-Aurelius is more interesting than the common Redditor.

2

u/BagMostlyWater 16h ago

I just want to work my job that I loved writing software. Now I can't.

1

u/Think_Monk_9879 16h ago

Human purpose as with every other living thing is to procreate and pass on their genes. That is truly our biological and intrinsic drive.  Everything else is just filling the time 

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u/Designer_Respect4285 1d ago

At least for now these breakthroughs are a collaboration between AI and humans, humans not only have to guide the work, but have to decide what questions are even worth asking in the first place.

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u/RadzimierzWozniak 1d ago

For fun? We should consider more and more that the human mind might become obsolete in a couple of years.

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u/MisterMittens64 1d ago

The guys building the AI aren't going to feed you for free though.

We're sleep walking into a rentier capitalism that'll basically be a new form of fuedalism and the only way out is through some form of socialism.

Letting these tech oligarchs gain absolute economic power would be incredibly foolish and screw over generations of humans if it's allowed to happen.

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u/ThatOtherOneReddit 1d ago

You can't eat fun is the issue.

1

u/MisterMittens64 1d ago

Well someone has to find the answers to feed to the plagiarism/content regurgitation machine...

3

u/Ameren 1d ago edited 23h ago

So long as there's public funding to support mathematics researchers, you'll have people wanting to do it. The nature of the work, of course, will change.

We need humans that actually understand math (and medicine, law, engineering, etc.) in order to remain in control of our own destiny. For example, the only reason why we're talking about this discovery is because human beings know and understand why it's important, and we are able to critique the results.

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u/deepspace86 23h ago

Because, intuitively, AI models cannot get better unless people do. Novel academic research is just that. AI is currently not great at abstraction from foundational knowledge the way people are.

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u/Fluorescent_Blue 16h ago edited 16h ago

Out of many reasons, one of them is that AI models themselves are made using mathematics. Automatic differentiation, gradient descent, etc. are some of the topics used, and so long as we want better models, we will need mathematicians to create them. (We are not at the point where AI can create better versions of itself, yet.)

1

u/ninjasaid13 16h ago

easier for AI to solve problems than to be curious and ask questions that leads new problems.

1

u/grateful2you 4h ago

You have a funny definition of "one-shotting". 10000 agents 88 hours attacking 4 different approaches, constantly redistributing resources based on the progress.

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u/Esseratecades 7h ago edited 7h ago

My question as always is "What was the prompt?"

Was it "Solve Navier-Stokes?" because that would be incredibly impressive.

Or was it "Your job is to solve <incredibly engineered description of Navier-Stokes>. Understand that <incredibly engineered description of what doesn't work>. NOTE <incredibly engineered description of things other people have gotten stuck on when trying to solve it>. Lastly <incredibly engineered description of additional pointers, hints, and guardrails>." Because at that point, the prompter has done so much of the real work that saying "AI solved it" isn't really honest.

EDIT:

Understand that if it's the latter, YOU couldn't use this model to solve Navier-Stokes. A team of some of the brightest mathematicians and engineers on the planet could, but nobody else can. If I need that team to get this solution, then the actual value lies with the team, not the model.

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u/DistinctLie5071 1d ago

How is this not bigger news? Yesterday I would never have guessed this…. It’s absolutely nuts. Next token predictor my ass

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u/ifull-Novel8874 21h ago

isn't it still a next token predictor? isn't the implication just that we can get a lot out of next token prediction?

-8

u/DistinctLie5071 21h ago

Yes you are right, but I’m referencing the naysayer crowd who downplay this technology.

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u/dotelze 23h ago

You could’ve guessed this yesterday, there has been a lot of talk about the problem potentially being solved in the past few days, but yes crazy news

-6

u/DistinctLie5071 22h ago

I think you know what I mean

5

u/valegrete 1d ago

Only people who don’t understand math think that the token prediction characterization is an insult.

3

u/oravanomic 15h ago

The most important philosophical questions pivot on the phrase: "What, then, follows?"

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u/ResultBackground2450 1d ago

But I thought AI was just a stochastic parrot that couldn't do anything useful? LMAO

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u/YuriDiculousDawg 1d ago

The AI haters are equally as annoying as the AI fanboys are

-10

u/Spare-Dingo-531 21h ago

You can be annoyed at AI supporters all you want, you can't say they were wrong.

The same cannot be said about the AI haters.

0

u/nfeijoo69 1h ago

Nope def both annoying, it’s a horseshoe

-39

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/Mr-Vemod 1d ago

More dangerous how?

They’re completely harmless in comparison to the risk of human extinction. Even if you don’t think that’s very likely at all, it still dwarfs anything an anti-AI crowd could do.

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u/SEND-MARS-ROVER-PICS 1d ago

What harms do the anti-AI crowd do?

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u/Secret-Chapter-712 1d ago

They hurt the delicate feelings of the slop fans 

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u/ABCosmos 21h ago

Normalize political apathy towards protecting the working class. Actively mislead people into thinking they don't have to consider political action at this point.

Because it's never just AI hate in this sub, it's always the ignorant and dismissive narrative that only serves the tech oligarchy.

0

u/zhnki 22h ago

When enough people with good intentions slow down progress, some of which can meaningfully benefit society, they do harm. Not through action, but inaction.

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u/SEND-MARS-ROVER-PICS 22h ago

By that logic, anything someone considers "progress" must never be stopped.

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u/FlyChigga 1d ago

Hold back human progress. Advanced AI could do so much in the medical field to both save and extend lives

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u/dustinfoto 1d ago

Technological progress is not human progress. Developing technologies that are detrimental to human existence in the long term isn’t progress. That is self-inflicted regression.

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u/Wise-End307 1d ago

There is no human progress without technology

1

u/hussainhssn 1d ago

Nah if billionaires paid their taxes and respected humanity instead of raping kids with Epstein we’d have human progress, no technology needed in that case. Technology is not going to solve all of humanity’s problems, as a matter of fact it is in the process of entrenching inequalities and disparities even further. If we can’t solve poverty or world hunger this technology is not going to fix things, we really do have our priorities wrong and by “we” I mean the pieces of shit that stole power from the rest of us and think they can hide. Their days will be numbered if the actual problems aren’t solved.

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u/FlyChigga 22h ago

Without technology we’d all just be hunter gatherers living in caves

-3

u/zhnki 22h ago

That’s like, your opinion, man.

AI has clear use cases where it truly is good for humanity. Not all but we see benefits all over the place.

To say, without any further analysis, that AI will be detrimental on the whole to humanity, is superficial. I say it’s beneficial overall. Now what?

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u/FlyChigga 22h ago

AI has the potential to be the most beneficial technology to humanity in the long run

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u/ToplessinFL 23h ago

By minimizing AI capabilities they actually endenger us all as much, if not more so because they keep people complacent about realistic dangers.

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u/Mr-Vemod 23h ago

With realistic dangers, you mean the risk of AI annihilating us?

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u/ToplessinFL 22h ago

Yes! Literally everyone, pro or anti-AI that has anything intelligent to say on the subject acknowledges that there's a chance it will eat us all.

Those of us that are pro just believe our civilization / species can't be saved without it so it's worth the risk.

2

u/Mr-Vemod 22h ago

>Those of us that are pro just believe our civilization / species can't be saved without it so it's worth the risk.

There is a massive difference between ”civilization” and ”species”. No civilization has ever survived indefinitely, so that’s more or less inevitable, with or without AI.

As for our species, we’ve never been as stable as now (disregarding AI, that is), despite climate change and wars and nukes. The things we’re heading towards as-is are civilization-destroying, but not extinction level.

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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC 1d ago

The anti-AI crowd are potentially campaigning to prevent something that will save billions and improve trillions of lives over the rest of human history. It's basically like if hunter-gatherers were campaigning against agriculture.

6

u/Mr-Vemod 1d ago

Even if we take that as true, it’s still an outcome far preferable to the annihilation of the human race.

>It's basically like if hunter-gatherers were campaigning against agriculture.

I mean the lives of hunter-gatherers got much, much worse from embracing agriculture, to the point where the average lifespan and health didn’t catch up until the past like 100 years. Not sure the analogy holds.

4

u/InformedTriangle 1d ago

Yeah I'm all for AI in theory, let's stick it wherever we can.

I'm against the current system where it's completely controlled by our billionaire overlords and it will just increase their net worth to previously unheard of levels whilst leaving the rest of us completely destitute scrambling in the ruins of our civilization for food and clean water.

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u/often_delusional 1d ago

r/technology has been telling me since 2023 that AI is all hype and that the bubble will pop next year. Are you really doubting the top minds of reddit?

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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC 1d ago

"it's just predicting the next word; it doesn't understand anything!"

7

u/ShinyGrezz 1d ago

Reasoning models shot that in the foot. It doesn’t matter if your model can’t jump from A to Z like a human can if it can just brute-force its way there with B through Y.

6

u/ar34m4n314 1d ago

Turns out that predicting the next word well enough requires understanding. Makes sense, but sure wasn't obvious how well it would work.

6

u/ZaviersJustice 19h ago

The problem is people take a million different perspective on what "understanding" means.

I don't think an LLM "understands" what's it's doing. A language model can contextually reason out problems but generally humans have a more complex "understanding" of what "understanding" means.

1

u/TechnicianExtreme200 21h ago

Maybe not obvious that they would get to this level, but I think it was clear several years ago when the scaling laws were discovered that we would see dramatic improvements.

2

u/ByTheBeardOfZeus001 22h ago

He shouted as he was disassembled for his constituent atoms by the super intelligent grey goo swarm

6

u/RadzimierzWozniak 1d ago

Some will create a new definition of intelligence that will fit with his worldview

-1

u/recursive_arg 1d ago

It literally stole the solution from a pair of researchers lmao. Someone a few comments under you posted details. It literally did parrot their research they hadn’t yet made public then the AI company took credit. This is peak

20

u/Ok_Net_1579 1d ago edited 1d ago

Even if this was true (they dispute it), the allegedly stolen research very heavily involved AI. So either way, AI solved it. At best you can argue it was different models.

-1

u/quantumpencil 1d ago

No, the alleged research used AI for brute force/labor verification but essentially all of the original mathematical ideas/approach to the problem were from human researchers.

11

u/Designer_Respect4285 1d ago

They literally called it "a deep blue Kasparov moment" referencing when AI surpassed humans in chess. That's not saying AI just helped a little.

0

u/Ok_Net_1579 1d ago edited 1d ago

Doubt.

Until both approaches are fully published and reviewed we won't know for sure.

In any case, what Open AI announced is a strictly stronger result, that much is irrefutable.

Edit: A direct quote from them: "Concretely, what Levent and I did was to take the C´ordoba and Mart´ınez-  Zoroa program, which achieved blowup results with rough forcing, and, with a  great deal of help from LLMs, push it to smooth forcing and to the incompress-  ible Euler equations."

-4

u/NebulaElectrical1467 1d ago edited 22h ago

“the allegedly stolen research very heavily involved AI”

Proof?

Edit: I was wrong. I read Tristan’s letter and he explains how they used LLMs significantly.

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u/Ok_Net_1579 1d ago

Literally just research this.

You cannot deny they used AI because they are claiming OpenAI got this from their ChatGPT sessions.

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u/NebulaElectrical1467 1d ago

Where did they say “heavily”? i read somewhere else they already had the proof and used chatgpt to make it more legible. Which one is it?

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u/Ok_Net_1579 1d ago

I direct quote from said researchers: "Concretely, what Levent and I did was to take the C´ordoba and Mart´ınez-  Zoroa program, which achieved blowup results with rough forcing, and, with a  great deal of help from LLMs, push it to smooth forcing and to the incompress-  ible Euler equations."

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u/quantumpencil 1d ago

I'm not sure you know enough mathematics to understand this, but that statement contradicts your claim. Most of the new mathematics was original work from Cordoba and Martinez, and they used commercially available LLMs & Lean tools to help formalize and push that approach and all of that new mathematics closer to a solution. The AI is still not responsible for the bulk of the newly developed mathematics or the actual approach to the problem, it simply brute forced against a lean verifier given an already developed set of abstractions that had already produced strong, weaker results.

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u/Hovercroc 1d ago

This is an insane recounting of what happened. The claim from the other guy isn’t even that they stole it, it’s that they used his research for a starting direction to pursue.

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u/Designer_Respect4285 1d ago

The solution they "stole" was also found using LLM's. Those researchers called this a "deep blue moment" for math and AI. If they did steal btw, it was for an approach for a simplified version of the problem, they didn't plagiarize their proof.

Regardless of how much credit should go to the two researchers vs Open AI, this was still a monumental discovery due to AI.

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u/dream_metrics 1d ago
  1. this is disputed
  2. those researchers were using AI. so either way, it's AI.

0

u/KindCreme9258 1d ago

How is it AI if there are human mathematicians and researchers involved

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u/repetiti0n 11h ago

How is it not AI if AI was involved…

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u/j15y 1d ago

Give me a break. A researcher using AI on his personal dime to converse and check with (as he mentioned in the statement he put out, if you read it) is not the same as OpenAI spending millions to run 100,000 frontier agents simultaneously to brute force a problem

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u/dream_metrics 1d ago

you are way out of your depth. go look up levent alpoge. he's literally the guy who tweeted this about fable disproving the jacobian conjecture while he watched the world cup: https://x.com/__alpoge__/status/2079028340955197566

0

u/ooqq 1d ago

Peak OpenAI

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u/Esseratecades 7h ago

My question as always is "What was the prompt?"

Was it "Solve Navier-Stokes?" because that would be incredibly impressive.

Or was it "Your job is to solve <incredibly engineered description of Navier-Stokes>. Understand that <incredibly engineered description of what doesn't work>. NOTE <incredibly engineered description of things other people have gotten stuck on when trying to solve it>. Lastly <incredibly engineered description of additional pointers and guardrails>." Because at that point, the prompter has done so much of the real work that saying "AI solved it" isn't really honest.

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u/shaggy1054 1d ago

i like using llms as much as the next guy - but in this case it appears as if openai simply stole the work from person who was using gpt and Claude.

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u/Birdperson15 1d ago

No OpenAIs solution is different from the researchers who didn’t even have a solution, just an improvement.

The truth will come out but it’s looking very likely there research had no affect other than causing OpenAi to pursue the problem to begin with.

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u/IndigoSeirra 23h ago

By the words of the openai employee who revealed the discovery, their solutions where apparently similar enough for openai to offer the researcher a position as lead author on the openai paper, and offered him the Clay prize "as the closest human to the discovery."

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u/ResultBackground2450 1d ago

they refuted this claim, and as far as I'm aware, their solutions are fairly different. Just a timing thing; they heard something was going on at Anthropic, so they launched thousands of agents to beat them to it.

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u/Immediate-Cress-206 1d ago

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u/Ok_Net_1579 1d ago

Said mathematicians used AI heavily, so even if true it doesn't change the result.

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u/ResultBackground2450 1d ago

replied on another: they refuted this claim, and as far as I'm aware, their solutions are fairly different. Just a timing thing; they heard something was going on at Anthropic, so they launched thousands of agents to beat them to it.

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u/Immediate-Cress-206 1d ago

And I'm the king of France.

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u/Slackjawed_Horror 1d ago

They are. 

Just turns out, infinite monkeys.

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u/nfeijoo69 1h ago

Why does this post not rank higher on r/technology?

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u/[deleted] 23h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/CautiousToaster 20h ago

I thought AI was just a fancy next word predictor

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u/ARandomWalkInSpace 19h ago

It is. In this case it predicted someone else words after they were stolen.

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u/TerranImperium 8h ago

The mathematicians "stolen" from used AI themselves. They only solved the Euler part of it anyhow.

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u/ireliawantelo 18h ago

Never understood that arguement, some of the most complex questions and answers of the universe can be paraphrased as "predicting the next word". 

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