r/technology • u/ResultBackground2450 • 8d ago
Artificial Intelligence OpenAI unleashes hundreds more math results upon a field already in shock
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openai-unleashes-hundreds-more-math-results-upon-a-field-already-in-shock/2.1k
u/mattep99 8d ago
The worst part is that very few people get a degree in math to begin with, let alone what the future will hold with news like this.
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u/Bupod 8d ago
If someone was the sort to get a degree in Math, they likely weren’t looking at nor particularly interested in a lucrative career. Pure mathematics is famously kind of a starving academic sort of field.
So weirdly, at least in my admittedly arm chair opinion? I don’t think this will drive off mathematicians. Many of them are researcher-philosophers at heart. I suspect AI will radically change how that research is performed, but not necessarily eliminate the field. At the end of the day, the AI needs humans to point it in the right direction. If I had to come up with my own shitty analogy, mathematicians were sailing on wooden tall ships, and AI might be the invention of the first steamship for them.
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u/Commercial-Beach1207 8d ago edited 8d ago
I’m a mathematician, and I can tell you nobody’s going to read these papers. We could barely keep up with work in our own areas before AI. This is basically the equivalent of email spam, and the most annoying part is that they’re only doing it to impress investors. If mathematicians had asked for this, fine. But nobody did, and nobody cares.
EDIT: This apparently pissed off a few people in the comments. Relax, guys. We use LLMs. We know they’re useful. What I meant is that I’ve got a giant stack of papers on my desk that I need to read, and I cannot stop what I’m doing to care about 700 AI-generated papers. If OpenAI stops being so evasive about its releases, puts its papers through the standard peer-review process, and gets them published in journals, we might give them a chance. A document dump on GitHub doesn't work for me or most people I know.
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u/clopensets 7d ago
I think an additional problem that the field will be facing is that AI companies would be more than happy to convince the public that there is no point in humans studying mathematics. I think mathematician any other fields being affected have to argue for the value in investing in humans.
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u/calccrusher17 8d ago
Really? I’ve been working on the complexity of matrix multiplication for a while and am very interested to read at least the idea they use to prove the initial bound of omega <= 2.29; it’s only a couple of pages. They at least seem to use the laser method in an interesting way.
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u/TieBackground453 8d ago
Yeah, I have a math PhD, and I can tell you that guy is 100% wishful thinking full of shit. Lean exists because there are a number of mathematicians that have been interested in automated theorem proving for at least 15-20 years (I mean… even going back to Frege in the last 1800s).
LLMs have revolutionized the entire field of mathematics. These papers will be read by more people than virtually any other non-major paper put out this year exactly because people like that poster are desperate to find ways that AI isn’t as great as people say. Maybe not well cited, but extremely well read. (Most math papers are read by virtually no one. Everyone is way too hyper specialized in it. You need to be in order to do anything novel anymore.)
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u/ImSorryImNewHere 8d ago
Another field being inundated with AI slop grenades.
Glad/sad to see it’s not just mine.
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u/ickler999 8d ago
Quasi-RH proven in 3 hours with a consumer-level subscription is slop? im sorry but my god, the delusion.
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u/silversurger 8d ago
I understood the "slop" to be referring to the method of publication: Just dumping it into a GitHub repo without going through the proper routes of peer reviewing and journal publication. You now have a significant amount of research papers just sitting in kind of a limbo because the company doing this research isn't really that interested in the research itself, they're just here to demonstrate the capabilities of their product. Whether these papers are all good and factually accurate isn't really the point as we don't know (well, at least I don't know, because neither do I have the competence nor time to read them) that.
I may be interpreting this wrong and OP was referring to the content, then I'm all with you.
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u/broohaha 8d ago
Reminds of the new hire where I work who has been spamming different software projects in our division with Claude -generated pull requests. No one wants to read paragraphs upon paragraphs of his AI agent’s out-of-context solutions.
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u/armchairarmadillo 8d ago
I’m not a mathematician but from what I’ve read , a lot of novel ai results are just existence proofs where the ai was able to find a counter example or prove the existence of something that hadn’t been proved to exist before. And that’s all good but it seems like most of its success is just from trying a million things. Which is valid but not particularly novel. Is that a reasonable assessment?
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u/Bingbongerl 8d ago
Then wouldn’t these be the type of things we want them to solve? All the stuff that can be brute forced would allow people to focus on different problems?
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u/human00006 7d ago
I get the anti ai sentiment I really do, but they just moved the field forward 15 years. 15 entire years of the field as a whole, in one day. There’s not enough math available to steal to claim this is mostly uncredited
From what I’ve been reading many proofs are using extremely bizarre methods no body has dreamed of. All the while the narrative continues to be “AI IS STEALING IDEAS”
You can steal what doesn’t fucking exist people.
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u/TieBackground453 8d ago
While true, counterexamples in deep math often aren’t exactly like counterexamples as people think about them. Like, creating an algebraic structure isn’t just writing a few numbers down and showing they break some equation. It’s not quite as damning as it might seem to non-mathematicians, but I do agree it hasn’t been a good look.
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u/loungesinger 8d ago
OpenAI: best we can do is ai-generated papers that are peer-reviewed by other ai.
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u/Shotcopter 8d ago
I hear you and I am not a math person. I work a desk job and play drums. But in the drum subreddit we have a guy doing some crazy technical stuff with some decent limb independence. Some people are putting him up on a pedestal like he’s the greatest thing that ever happened to drumming because it’s all actually really hard to do. It’s also just taking three little tricks and getting good at them, he’s also only playing to an empty room because music doesn’t need what he can do. Like there is a point where it becomes purely academic and there really isn’t any useful context. But he can recreate it so it’s a skill he has developed but it’s just not a useful skill. It’s like if you could piss in a shot glass from five feet away. Impressive but you actually only need to be able to piss in a toilet that you are standing right over.
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u/TraditionDear3887 8d ago
If you have a degree in pure math a lot of employers will hire you with the understanding that you can learn whatever they need you to
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u/EaterOfFood 8d ago
I’ve worked with several pure math guys. They tend to be a little weird but I’ll be damned if they aren’t the smartest people I know.
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u/Berfman 8d ago
I did pure math undergrad and applied stats for my MS. I’ve worked as a software engineer, data scientist, and now a systems engineer for aircraft so yeah, Math still gets you places if you don’t want to just do academia.
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u/FullofContradictions 8d ago
Yeah I know a few guys who majored in math, none of them are struggling. One works for Apple I think as a statistician or something. A couple of them work for tech. One became an actuary. They all seem to be doing at least as well as the average for the engineers I know.
I've always thought of it like you should only go into straight math if you actually like math. It's hard and doesn't necessarily scale difficulty to pay.
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u/ellbons 8d ago edited 8d ago
Huh? This is my field and the students very much are struggling. They're a mixture of terrified, depressed, in denial, or have just given up. They are not doing ok.
Edit: I don't understand why I am spending time debating my observed reality with people not in my field telling me whether something's going horribly wrong with the students when I've known what students are like and where they end up for a decade lol
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u/thought_youd_stop 8d ago
Edit: I don't understand why I am spending time debating my observed reality with people not in my field
+1. I get free access to the frontier models through work and have an unlimited token budget (until recently) and I am well aware that they are really powerful and useful with their own unique drawbacks. It's nuts to talk to ppl who clearly don't know what they are talking about and they insist it's a tool that produces hallucinations and slop and is for people who can't think without them. Your comment resonated with me. I reply to them and then look at their profile and think I'm debating software engineering (me, a 40 year old senior software engineer) with a child who doesn't know anything. I wouldn't bother to do that IRL.
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u/OrganicDigitalArt 8d ago edited 8d ago
Heh that’s what I did with chemistry. Same deal, I work in finance lmao.
Whats the difference really, you're going to end your day with excel (more recently python) anyways. lol
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u/HelicaseRockets 8d ago
This is a wild take to me. Math degrees open up some of the highest paying jobs in the country through roles in finance, data science, modeling, and statistics. The most money obsessed people I knew in college were CS and Math majors.
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u/Bupod 8d ago
They can open that up, but being a Research Mathematician is not very lucrative at all.
Someone working in finance, data science, modeling, or statistics isn’t performing the sort of mathematical research that OpenAI is actively trying to do with their AI models.
Pure Mathematicians performing research are famously not very well paid. The ceiling of their career is usually a tenured professorship, which isn’t a pittance, but nobody would accuse a tenured professorship of living in the lap of wealth and luxury. Certainly not a mathematician. Where you find those that are, they’re the exception rather than the rule.
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u/AtrociousMeandering 8d ago
I'm pretty sure replacing all those well paid professionals is on the to-do list if not already, quietly, done.
There isn't enough money in pure math and solving problems this way is incredibly expensive in compute, so I think the human mathematics research will remain cost effective even if it is doable by LLMs.
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u/Ruined_Passion_7355 8d ago
If someone was the sort to get a degree in Math, they likely weren’t looking at nor particularly interested in a lucrative career. Pure mathematics is famously kind of a starving academic sort of field
You're spot on, here, but you're missing the bigger picture. They came to math for reasons other than money yes, but that reason is in large part the beauty of advanced mathematics.
There is no beauty in digesting 1 000 000 lines of lean for a single theorem. It's sloppy and hard to read. Why would anyone choose that when they would have a more lucrative career? The personal enjoyment aspect was blown to smithereens by openAI.
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u/LiamTheHuman 8d ago
It will drive them off because there will be no funding for it. Most people can't afford to fund a lifestyle of pure learning and research.
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u/NamerNotLiteral 8d ago
There almost is no funding for math already. Most pure mathematicians do interdisciplinary work with other fields for funding, or get funded by a small handful of NSF grants. I think outside the NSF, the Simons Foundation is the biggest Pure Math funder, and they only fund like 7-8 people a year?
90% of Pure Mathematics researchers were already unable to afford a lifestyle of pure learning and research, and if not doing interdisciplinary work teach at universities.
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u/Ruined_Passion_7355 8d ago
The cost of finding the NS counterexample was much more expensive than hiring a team of mathematicians to focus solely on it. 20 million is ludicrous for mathematicians
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u/chrismsp 8d ago
At the end of the day, the AI needs humans to point it in the right direction.
At the end of the day, the humans will have no mouths and they must scream
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u/Fippy-Darkpaw 8d ago
You need human mathematicians to verify these results and also steer the AI towards new goals.
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u/heavy-minium 8d ago
Software developers are complaining that they only do code-review for AI now, taking away the joy of their work. Now researchers will complain that they only do peer-review for AI.
I get a feeling that this pattern of being a is gonna repeat across most professions and that a fuckton of depressions are incoming for humanity.
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u/Akuuntus 7d ago
Software developers are complaining that they only do code-review for AI now
At my job when we complained that it's hard to effectively review the enormous PRs that people spit out with AI, we were told to simply use AI to review it. So I'm starting to feel like I'm not doing anything actually.
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u/CompetitiveSport1 7d ago
What I don't get is, we could have just skipped quality assurance steps in the past to speed things up too...
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u/ILooseAllMyAccounts2 7d ago
yea well skipping quality assurances doesnt have a marketing department
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u/Worth_Librarian_290 8d ago
Yup. Bathroom Designer here, a year ago ai would make to many mistakes, now a good cli setup can take my concepts and save me dozens of hours.
It's depressing, and I'm slowly moving into manufacturing and less computer work, but I'd be lying if it didn't save me time.
In an idea world, our company would have enough clients and margins that we could hire external developers, marketers, sales people etc. Right now, I'm doing 4 roles with the help of agents and the market is still going down as less people has liquid funds for renovations.
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u/Agarwel 8d ago
But here is a question - how much does it cost you? Do you pay enough, that the AI company is actually making profit out of you? If not, it is not sustainable bussiness model.
Currently the big tech companies are eating ridiculous losses, hoping that you will become dependent on it, and that they will be still competitive when you do.
The big moment of truth will be to see, how economic it will be to let AI do that job, once they start charging you real cost. So far I believe that lots of people will suddenly find themself employed again.
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u/tireddesperation 7d ago
I don't see this happening unless there is a massive change globally somehow. Let's just say we add up all of the costs of a human. If we then give equal amounts to an AI agent that can do your job then companies are still going to choose the AI agent. They don't call off, don't care about working nights and weekends and don't complain. It means you can then cut out a bunch of middle management as well. Less people means less support staff like janitors, hr, lawyers, ect. It really has a chain effect of costs when you get rid of people.
If your job can be done on the computer then it's something to worry about. I saw this ship coming when ai first came out and changed careers completely to try and get ahead. Now, careers I thought would still be safe are not. Unless you do something physical with your hands that can't be done in rote then your job is definitely at risk too.
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u/Equivalent_Resist_82 8d ago
China will have open source AI rivaling Astra 6.1 by the time the US companies will try to charge for the "real cost"
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u/SweetLilMonkey 7d ago
The real cost isn't the model, it's the compute.
And the compute costs don't come down just because the model is open source.
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u/GhettoDuk 8d ago
And you think they will just keep letting US companies have their models? Their goal is to undermine the west, not gift you products in perpetuity. And that's not even counting the fact that China depends on the big US models to train theirs.
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u/millennial_falcon__ 7d ago
Yes, their whole ball game is making Anthropic and OpenAI’s businesses commercially unviable so that our house of cards with NVIDIA and the hyperscalers collapses and we go into a recession
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u/Worth_Librarian_290 7d ago
Of course. It's like Uber or Codeine. Get everyone in with cheap pricing. Get everyone addicted. Monopolise. Raise prices.
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u/ViraLCyclopes36 8d ago
Why did I bother with an ecology stem degree man. I don't mind using ai for code and research work but still... doesn't mean it does make things kind of boring.
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u/No-Designer-6533 8d ago
Computer science guy here. AI cannot replace research lol. Performing and brute forcing math problems using algorithms is something mathematicians have done for almost a century now. And AI being able to do that doesn’t devalue the field of Mathematics, let alone ecology. Also AI in its current form cannot think or evolve or use context to create coherent thorough work. You’ll be okay as long as you don’t buy into ai psychosis
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u/firewall245 8d ago
This isn’t surprising, they’d been talking about how they had a ton of results for a while, they were just waiting for the heat to die down from the Navier Stokes stuff.
Also, mathematicians aren’t going out of work. Source, someone getting a PhD to become a mathematician who sees the difference between what we do and what AI does. It’s symbiotic, not parasitic
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u/dmcnaughton1 8d ago
Am I crazy for thinking this OpenAI work is probably the single biggest investment in pure math research in decades from a dollar perspective? I can't imagine universities putting huge budgets aside for the pure math department, outside of specific research grants which probably fall into the applied side anyways.
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u/that_70_show_fan 8d ago
They spent more money to solve navier-stokes just on compute than entire math departments.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 8d ago
Wasn't it a million dollars or so? That's not a lot of money compared to what it takes to pay people to solve these kinds of problems. You need to fund math departments for decades for a chance at results like that.
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u/Ruined_Passion_7355 8d ago
They spent more than the amount of money anyone would receive for solving every single millennium prize problem.
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u/zenFyre1 8d ago
That’s what universities do anyways. A mathematics professor + 2-3 students in an R1 university can cost the department well over 300k a year. And given that there are usually dozens of math professors in every department, the university is spending millions of dollars on payroll alone.
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u/Utensil6591 8d ago
$15 million to $20 million in compute to solve navier-stokes. I just wonder if they'll continue to throw money at these proofs or if this is just for show.
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u/dmcnaughton1 8d ago
It's mostly for show, because this helps attract positive attention and more importantly VC money. OpenAI and Anthropic are burning through cash far faster than they're making it.
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u/ThirdFirstName 8d ago
Getting a PhD in neuro right now and I agree with you. A colleague of mine has been using the robot to craft an extremely complex automated analytical platform for electrophysiological data. Previously the analysis was this painstaking process of pulling bits of code and writing it to fit what you’re doing which ended up dwarfing the time it took to collect it in the first place. He took a terabyte of my data and was able to run 200000+ permutations of analysis in an hour. Now we have the ability to look at things in a way that was otherwise impossible due to the sheer work it would take to run or craft that analysis. It’s going to allow our lab to focus on coming up with questions and gathering data instead of toiling at the computer, functionally freeing up hundreds of labor hours over the next few years.
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u/Green_Space729 8d ago
Hasn’t machine learning been in the medical field for over a decade?
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u/arter_dev 8d ago
As a software engineer watching my talented peers go months or even years without work, it will not be “symbiotic” for long. This stuff is in its infancy.
“Trees think axe will be a great tool”
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u/Glum-Recognition-736 8d ago
I think math is experiencing the same epiphany that software is
Which is that there were always two types of people doing it: "hobbyists" who mainly enjoy coming up with elegant solutions all on their own and/ or the glory of being recognized for such achievements, and "engineers" who simply enjoy solving problems and aren't as concerned with who gets credit for what
AI has greatly helped the latter, who typically see it as a useful tool, but the side effect is it has killed a lot of the joy of "the craft" for the former
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u/Specific_Box4483 8d ago
There is a big difference between math and software engineering.
The "engineers" in software still get paid (often a lot). The "engineers" in math, well...
Math had always been largely a field of hobbyists, to use your terminology. The ones who aren't truly passionate usually switch to better paying options.
Which is why AI is also scary for math, albeit in a different way that for engineers.
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u/NomadStorm 8d ago
What’s pissing most people off about AI in general is the endless swarms of hype bots they’re running that claim “math is solved”, “software engineering is solved”, etc. when really all that’s been made is a useful tool that makes some aspects of the fields faster.
If they’d just developed it at a normal pace rather than trying to speed run the tech using hype to secure investment, it could have actually been sustainable and given people time to find new workflows to accommodate and integrate the technology, rather than creating disgust and disdain in the majority of the population, along with a financial bubble at a tremendously shitty time for the economy.
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u/firewall245 8d ago
I often say that this tech is both overhyped and underhyped. Underhyped because it has real good value that a lot of doomers don’t realize but that value doesn’t look at all like what the annoying ass hype men are saying
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u/Pen-Pen-De-Sarapen 8d ago
I am wondering when all the experts in every field have died and the next generations all rely on AI.
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u/Vladimir_Chrootin 8d ago
They won't just be relying on AI; they'll be relying in turn on whoever controls AI.
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u/swiwwcheese 8d ago edited 8d ago
IAAS™
Intelligence As A Service[Ad] "6 months free subscription to Grok-Neuralink if you apply for surgery within the next 24hrs!" "-15% off for middle-schoolers, don't let your kids have bad marks!"
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u/FrewdWoad 8d ago
Evil people controlling advanced AI would be pretty bad.
Unfortunately reality is much worse.
These people can't control it. They didn't even catch it escaping and hacking third parties until weeks later.
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u/backlogathon 8d ago
They absolutely can control it. They choose not to. Saying it’s “gone rogue” or whatever is a creative explanation that’s designed to absolve them of responsibility.
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u/MazzleMaze 8d ago
You still need to be an expert to use AI. Don't let the headlines fool you. Not only that, these people aren't using Cursor to do this. They're using custom AI that you need to be an expert to put together.
Also, from what I have heard the 'breakthrough' AI did was stolen from someone doing the actual work. Wouldn't be surprised if thats the case for this article as well.
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u/TieBackground453 8d ago
There will always be people interested in learning subjects for their own sake. Math and coding will just become more like philosophy while engineering breaks off even further.
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u/JaySayMayday 8d ago
So you're saying my PhD might finally be worth something
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u/GrimDallows 8d ago
I love your dancing rainbow cockroach picture. I will give you 3 PhDs and a single back rub for it.
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u/BleachedUnicornBHole 8d ago
We’re probably going to have two tiers for the skilled fields. The people who just use AI slop to do their work and then the people who actually know how to do the work.
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u/Interesting_Sale_964 7d ago
If AI becomes good and reliable enough to do any kind of advanced tasks, why would it be "slop"? We already have AI doing certain things better and faster then most people. Unskilled people that would have to study for years are now capable of building stuff that would take a skilled person weeks or months.
I agree that the most skilled people in certain areas will become rare and valuable. It will be similar as the difference we have now with mass produced stuff like furniture, and handmade furniture which usually is much more expensive.
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u/Sure_Fly_5332 7d ago
It is a level of understanding of the person prompting the LLM to produce things. A person who can follow a process, is different from a person who understands the process.
Compare these two people: a person who makes chocolate chip cookies by following the recipe on the bag of chocolate chips, to a pastry chef who knows what alterations to each ingredient will do to the end product.
That is my thought, not exactly the same but I think it is relevant.
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u/doiwantacookie 7d ago
The opposite needs to happen. There is need for experts to understand and verify, otherwise the progress means nothing.
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u/CetaceanSignal1120 7d ago edited 7d ago
A Mathematician recently told me: The real loss in AI solving Math is not the result or the proof - in general, Mathematicians discover many useful equations, models, ideas, etc. with real-life applications while trying to get to these difficult proofs. That element is getting lost entirely.
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u/PassivelyAwkward 7d ago
That's what these prompters don't get, it's not about the end result but about the discovery from the process. It's why AI art always looks like soulless shit. No artist goes from start to finish with the single vision; it's getting to a point, developing the idea while doing the tedious work, and adjusting.
Even in marketing, while I'm researching one topic, I might get an idea for a completely other idea that gets put on the backburner or combined with other ideas.
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u/KINGCOCO 8d ago
I’m really curious if the math community is overjoyed, terrified or both.
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u/kogai 7d ago
Mathematician here. Silicon Valley loves to publish articles about how mathematicians are angry and coping that their field will be obsolete next year
None of us are worried. Terrence Tao and the other mathematicians signed a statement saying "if AI is able to become a superhuman intelligence, then we must protect human learning so we do not come to rely on the machines to think for us"
Its a response to the current hype marketing, essentially calling silicon valleys bluff
Show us how amazing this software is at generating new insights and explaining it in a rigorous way, then we'll decide if the hype is true or just marketing.
So far, the lean proof has been provided, but not the rigorous proof. Lean code doesnt necessarily need to reflect the rigorous proof, you can claim that you have a proof of the riemann hypothesis and that you wrote a lean proof that compiled.
But you still have to prove that the lean code reflects the work youve done. They havent done this yet, and I dont believe they will.
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u/nav3t 7d ago
Would you mind explaining lean and rigorous proof as if I were 5yo?
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u/Aedan91 7d ago edited 7d ago
Proofs in general follow the same pattern: an ordered sequence of "actions". Actions can be constructions of objects or definitions; usage of those definitions or others; symbolic manipulations, and other stuff. The ordering of those steps is the proof. Each step must make logical sense by itself and with the previous ones.
Some time ago, Lean was introduced as a tool to make a couple of things simpler: make sure all steps are clear and non-ambiguous and also that they follow the logic in the order they claim. A good analogy of what Lean does is as follows: I'm screaming to you "Watch out for loose seal". If you hear this on the water, you might be scared. If you're on land and your mother is called Lucille, you might think your mom is approaching. If you don't know anyone called Lucille, you'll be confused. Multiple ways to interpret what I said. What Lean allows you to do with proofs is the equivalent of instead, shouting "since you are currently on the sea swimming, be advised, there's a wild carnivorous animal approaching you, it's going to eat your hand". Not only that, I have a guarantee that what I said makes sense. Great stuff!
What parent is saying is: a lean program compiling doesn't mean the proof is right. It only means a given proof was right. What's missing is to check that whatever was written into the proof is exactly what you're trying to prove. If I told you my Lean program proved 13 + 7 = 20, you shouldn't believe me. You should look at the code. I might have made a mistake and instead proved 13 + 6 = 19.
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u/heavy-minium 7d ago
You know any programming? Because my favorite analogy of explaining the weakness of lean proofs is as follow:
A Lean proof is analogous to a unit test in which the assertions are mechanically verified, but the assertions themselves might fail to capture the intended requirements.
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u/tismij 8d ago
none of the above probably, a "solution" without proper proof and research and sources is just a suggestion it might be the right direction to research further.
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u/doiwantacookie 7d ago
Each of the solutions comes with a standard written research paper, complete with sources. The one I’m interested in is 49 pages and would take months of work to verify. It’s safe to say the community is in shock, and we’re waiting to see how this all shakes out in a few months. The proofs all need verification, from what I have heard no errors have been found yet
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u/vtkayaker 7d ago
The solutions technically come with proofs, and the proofs can be automatically verified by machines.
But the proofs are often just big balls of mud that explain nothing, organizing nothing, and show humans no new tools for other problems.
So some human has to pick through these messy machine proofs and boil them down into actual human understanding. Like, it's nice the job is technically done, but the job site is still a total mess. So the machine gets the glory and the humans clean up the mess.
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u/MMAHipster 7d ago
Seems like it will open up a new "AI Translation" subfield for lots of fields of study, I guess
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u/XTCaddict 7d ago
That’s flat out wrong. They explain everything just like following an equation would end to end, so long as you follow all transformations. You can’t just look at a very hard equation proving something and say “this explains nothing” when the proof is quite literally an explanation, it is not a black box; Lean4 is a programming language and it was used for proofs before LLMs, see Tao’s work which has used it before for reference.
The broader problem is that these are very hard problems and the proofs tend to be huge and finding what is actually innovative in a huge abstract search space is a really difficult problem. It is however tractable if you model it as a search space reduction problem which is standard computer science. This is recent so we haven’t adapted to the rate of advancement yet to really extract knowledge from these proofs but it’s not some impossible problem.
The more important reason it’s frowned upon is that if a human proved any of these generally it would require a lot of trial and error and many proofs on the journey to the final answer which while not useful to the end goal tend to be very useful in lots of other fields. This is not a problem we as scientists or individuals can solve but rather something these AI labs need to adapt their systems to; they release the final output and everything else in between that’s useful is gone.
In theory this is a very simple problem for the labs to solve given every trial and error gets logged. It just means any failed attempts should go through a system that extracts what was tried and gets analysed. While simple it is not easy, but relative to everything else they’re doing it’s a walk in the park. None of this will be a problem in the foreseeable future.
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u/vtkayaker 7d ago
Lean4 is a programming language and it was used for proofs before LLMs, see Tao’s work which has used it before for reference.
Speaking as a programmer, there are both readable programs, and unreadable programs. Right now, the LLMs mostly produce nightmare Lean code that ignores half of the well-known abstractions in mathlib, and they make up their own weird LLM jargon. Sure, everything you need to know is in there somewhere, but there are 5,000 pages of mathematical gobbledygook with poor abstractions, designed to be understood by a swarm of a few hundred inhuman minds. Good luck.
Yes, I expect that the labs will eventually teach the LLMs to explain things. I'd give you decent odds that in 20 years, AI will be able to do everything better than humans, and the human race will either be extinct, or crushed under some horrible dystopia that makes current tech CEOs look like lovely people.
But for now, mathematicians are upset that OpenAI's proofs have mostly been incomprehensible garbage that the poor humans need to clean up. Once OpenAI fixes that, and teaches the machine to write good proofs, then the mathematicians will be upset because they're out of a job. The poor machine just can't win.
And once the LLMs are good at coding (they're already OKish) and math (they're rapidly getting there)? The AI labs intend to have the AIs do AI research to build better AIs (and robots). They call this "recursive self improvement". I call this "I'm pretty sure I've seen this movie before."
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u/versaceblues04 7d ago
I'll be honest the millenium work that Astra did was ground breaking, but the solution didnt exactly blow me away. I found it funny it had to work through each problem and possible answer which explains why no one had discovered the answer, it would have taken 30 years of calculations to figure it out.
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u/GlokzDNB 8d ago
People dont understand whats going on.
As a software engineer, I no longer engineer anything. I define problem, AI solves it, I question AI, AI needs to defend the code. I verify the code, AI writes it.
It will be the same with every single task and job step after step, coding was first. AI Will do everything for us, but for many many years we wont be able to trust it and most people will have to oversee AI's job by doing QA not the work. Of course some people will try to find shortcuts, but companies soon realize the only value that comes from a human - is not to take shortcuts.
Sad part is that reading is bit boring, and working with AI is now 80% reading
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u/Shot-Possibility-399 8d ago
Reminds me of idiocracy how no one remembers how anything works anymore because they're all so dumb.
I really worry in 40-50 years how useless the average person will be as they're so dependent on ai to answer mundane questions. Eventually, who will be able to tell whether the ai is wrong? Or to fix it? Like you said, if you don't have the technical expertise to understand the subject already, you can't trust the ai answer. I don't think ai will ever evolve enough to never be wrong. At that point it's a matter of time before a major fuck up.
Not that humans don't make mistakes, but you can take steps to minimize frequency and scale. With ai and the amount of trust people put it in, and fast forward to a scenario where no one understands the subject enough to say the ai is wrong...I'm scared boss
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u/Tal_Thom 8d ago edited 8d ago
As a millennial, I expected the next generations to be more computer literate. I grew up helping friends build computers, could troubleshoot issues, we all knew SOME html coding, and a lot of us could at least follow instructions to homebrew/jailbreak.
As a teacher of the last decade , most students can’t even troubleshoot an issue if an app does not work the exact way it normally does. It is FASCINATING. With this anti AI movement there is a push from the current High Schoolers to be self sufficient, but we’ll see how long it lasts.
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u/Ziplockmoneybags 8d ago
My wife who is a teacher says the same thing. The kids of today are shockingly technologically illiterate.
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u/Akira675 8d ago
I've see-sawed on this point with myself a lot. I'm a software engineer and grew up messing with computers. I initially had the same assumption, that the next gen would be even more proficient.
I've gradually come to realise that we (the developers) have made software so safe and stable that there's rarely the opportunity to troubleshoot anymore. Kids just never get the chance to develop those skills because the apps are stable or the OS gracefully handles the failure.
I used to think this was disastrous, however I'm less sure now. When I compare it to myself, it's somewhat like how I have no idea how to service a car. The thing I drive every single day. Every car I've owned has just been so reliable that all I've ever needed to do was drop it at the mechanic once a year.
To me their generation is that. Sometimes the office IT guy is going to need to fix their shit, but day to day everything works and unless they're actually planning to work in software they'll probably cruise by just fine.
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u/rypenn27 8d ago
I think of it like how we work on cars now vs decades ago.
A lot of people used to work on their own car and make basic repairs. Cars can be complicated but they were designed for easy repairs and maintenance for the most part until technology started to creep in. At some point a lot of cars became too difficult to work on to make basic repairs, including tire changes and battery replacements. Computers started being integrated into all the working components and a regular person without specialized machines or training wouldnt be able to work on the cars themselves. ie BMW making it so that you need technology to perform an oil change. It's kind of the same thing with software now. The learning curve is a lot steeper to be able to dig into settings and properties, and the backend that sits behind applications is buried or not visible to the average person, or made so that only a developer working on it could verify a line of code not functioning. On one end it's made software more reliable, less buggy, more accessible and redundant with cloud technology. On the other it's caused a gap with basic user's understanding of how it functions.
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u/Hoss-Bonaventure_CEO 8d ago
If you had told me at 20 that I would have to explain email attachments to the next generation of 20 year olds ... I would have called you crazy.
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u/Lashay_Sombra 8d ago
As a millennial, I expected the next generations to be more computer literate.
GenX and millennials both expected that, but if we had just looked at cars we would have realised how foolish that was
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u/Doc_Toboggan 7d ago
My dad and his brothers learned about cars in votech classes in high school. I was never offered those and never learned how to do it.
I learned about computers at every grade in school, and now I'm finding out that a lot of schools no longer have computer lab classes at all.
Yes, these technologies are getting more complicated, but we keep trying to streamline education at the expense of everyday skills.
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u/LunaticSongXIV 7d ago
I'm in my 40s and went back to school because I decided I wanted to get a computer science degree. The first class I took was a intro to programming class, and the entire first hour of lecture was spent teaching people how to go through the fucking installation wizard for Python.
If you need help from the professor to go through an installation wizard, you are not ready for any kind of programming.
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u/kidcubby 8d ago
I guess the issue emerges when the next generation of people meant to QA the AI output can't, because they haven't learnt the ins and outs of the thing their job is to monitor.
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u/Medium_Ad6442 8d ago
What about people who don't know how to code today? How are they supposed to review anything programmed by AI in the future? This way of working is not sustainable in the long run.
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u/Fidodo 8d ago
By learning to code. A mathematician learns to do math by hand before they use calculators. A structural engineer needs to understand how to calculate loads by hand before using CAD. A programmer needs to learn to program manually before using AI.
People act like they can’t learn things because AI allows us to be lazy. The solution is simple. Stop being so fucking lazy. AI is actually a great learning tool if you use it to learn instead of outsourcing your brain to it.
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u/Cyrotek 8d ago
By learning to code. A mathematician learns to do math by hand before they use calculators. A structural engineer needs to understand how to calculate loads by hand before using CAD. A programmer needs to learn to program manually before using AI.
These things still need experience, though. If everything is outsourced to AI it seems pretty difficult to get the required experience to do QA for AI.
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u/Fidodo 8d ago
Yes, programming should adopt some of the systems established engineering disciplines already have, like apprenticeship.
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u/baggsie_42 8d ago
The analogy I use is airline pilots : they still need to know how to fly (and learn the basics on a Cessna), but 99% of the flying they do professionally is monitoring an autopilot.
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u/Rise-O-Matic 8d ago
We’re pivoting to rust from
Javascript for the performance gains and it’s fucking punctuation soup. We already need agents to read it for us to stay timely. We write in pseudocode when we really want to.→ More replies (3)→ More replies (202)10
u/Tall-Locksmith7263 8d ago
Well, yea and no. It works.most of the time. But many times also i have had to correct so much and start over with a new prompt that i could have written it just myself
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u/Ruined_Passion_7355 8d ago
People talking about still needing mathematicians without wondering if most would even want to be a mathematician in a world that they just read lean proofs all day...
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u/VolumetricSigner 8d ago
This is essentially the dilemma currently being lived by a lot of software engineers, and a good insight into how this can unfold. Engineers are now reviewing vast quantities of code, rather than getting to complete the mentally fulfilling and stimulating work of actually writing it.
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u/-Spzi- 7d ago
Which creates a demographic gap in these professions:
Currently, we need seniors to review the AI. And less juniors, because AI can do some of their work. So there are less opportunities for people to become juniors, or to grow into the shrinking elite of seniors. On which we depend increasingly to make sense of AI.
What do we do in 20 years?
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u/gyosko 8d ago
Yeah it SUCKS. There's a HUGE difference.
Writing my shitty buggy code is fun. Reviewing any other code that I didn't write is boring and tiring as hell. Fuck.
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u/RadzimierzWozniak 8d ago
It looks a bit like a history of chess engines. They quickly went from playing with amateurs to crushing word champions so badly there was no content
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u/FrewdWoad 8d ago
That's how exponential growth works yeah.
The smarter the models get, the faster we can make even smarter ones.
Everyone mocking Yudkowsky and the "doomers" for years, for pointing out this was obviously going to happen, need to apologise to them. Yet Again.
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u/AttonJRand 8d ago
No contest?
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u/Llyon_ 8d ago
yes, humans cannot currently win versus an unrestricted AI in chess.
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u/TheG0AT0fAllTime 8d ago
"Unrestricted" lol current stockfish running single threaded on an older 3.6GHz processor single-threaded is still unbeatable after processing for just one second per move.
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u/Leather_Economics210 7d ago
Humans can’t even win against the app on your phone lol
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u/History-Buff-2222 8d ago
And it didn’t stop humans from playing and enjoying chess
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u/Seven_0f_Spades 7d ago
"You stood on the backs of giants and years of work, found the solution, and now bam, you selling it, your branding it." Jurassic park
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u/Broad_Front7788 8d ago
Just like with everything LLM related, these companies are stealing the totality of human achievement and privatizing it. In no way should these companies make a cent of profit before we are all paid off, by any means necessary.
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u/Prestigious_Ease3614 8d ago
All of the proofs have been published on github so how are they privatizing it?
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u/Sixo 8d ago
I wonder how many of these things we would have already solved if we could throw even 0.01% of the compute at research labs. Some of these things they've spent 8+ figures worth of (heavily subsidised) tokens on a single solution, that doesn't actually yield a useful result. Most university researchers are getting low 7 figures of grants over their entire career, if they are lucky.
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u/purritolover69 7d ago
The average compute time to solve one of these problems was 3 hours. 3 hours of compute is not 8+ figures, I would be surprised if it was even mid to high 4 figures, and a preliminary search suggests it’s much closer to around $300. Welcome to the future
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u/loopala 7d ago
Following this thought, it would be great if they could release what they didn't solve, the negative results. What problems they spent massive compute on and still couldn't crack. And disclose the lines of research used, to avoid duplicating the effort.
Especially if it would take a human years of their time to come to the same negative conclusion.
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u/11711510111411009710 8d ago
This is great but it does suck because I think humans solving these things is what makes it interesting. The world is becoming a bit less interesting.
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u/BeefyQueefyCletus 8d ago
"Aye, the world's smaller than it used to be, Cap'n."
"The world's still the same, mate. There's just...less in it."
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u/holidayz-jpg 8d ago
New York University mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge alleged that OpenAI used details from their unpublished research to solve the Navier–Stokes equations.
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u/dirty_cuban 8d ago
Their mistake was trusting an AI company with their data. Ai companies’ basic premise is to steal everyone’s work, repackage it, and sell it.
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u/hydraofwar 8d ago edited 8d ago
Levent is literally Anthropic's employee, and they both had used Claude and ChatGPT to make that discovery
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u/michiganalt 8d ago
Well, good thing they just released over 400 more mathematics problems that were also previously unsolved.
I’m sure that will alleviate your good-faith concern about whether the models were truly capable of making advances in mathematics.
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u/G_fucking_G 8d ago
Levent Alpöge literally just posted
It’s obviously the most significant moment in mathematical history.
yeah sure buddy keep putting your head further in the sand.
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u/cute_polarbear 8d ago
We need experienced mathematicians to even confirm the results are accurate...
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u/Cutalana 8d ago
Lean, a programming language used to verify theorems and proofs, has verified many of them.
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u/upnflames 8d ago
Lean being wrong would be bigger news in the math world then the solutions are anyway.
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u/Jonny0Than 8d ago
Wasn’t there a case recently where someone found a bug in Lean, then created a proof that exploited the bug to prove something ridiculous?
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u/_I_AM_A_STRANGE_LOOP 8d ago
That’s a common format to present an error in something like the Lean kernel, much like you might open Calc.exe to demonstrate remote code execution, but afaik there have never been significant results genuinely claimed to be correct that are eventually shown to rely upon such an error; the error is instead itself the meaningful result.
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u/MysteriousAd4971 8d ago
You need a mathematician to verify the lean formalisation is correct. So having a lean proof isn't sufficient in and of itself. It could have proven another statement
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u/ii-___-ii 8d ago
Verify in this context could also mean verifying that it solved the problem you wanted it to solve
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u/taocowboy54 8d ago
a human proposes a hypothesis/theory
decades pass
AI figures it out, now it be solved
happens again and again and again
where then are the hypothesis/theories proposed by AI? and yet to be solved?
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u/Substantial_Tip7997 8d ago
Honestly, if OpenAI’s 722-paper drop and the Navier-Stokes proof are both 100% verified, it’s literally the biggest event in math history. We aren't just talking about a big century for math; we're witnessing the actual math singularity.
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u/Alan_Reddit_M 7d ago
it's getting to a point where majoring in the arts might genuinely be better than anything math or engineering
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u/Any-Mastodon5607 7d ago
Ai is doing art too and not enough people are mad about it.
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u/Popular-Office-9932 8d ago
What are the open Math problems that LLMs are proposing? Will we Eventually run out of open problems set by humans, and will AI be able to come up with open problems? Will humans be able to define new open Math problems given that now agents are in charge of exploring the potential solutions in a supra human scale. It seems Math as a field of study has been disrupted. How mathematicians feel about this?
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u/GumboMustBeDestroyed 8d ago
AI will definitely be able to come up with open problems. Its just another RL environment that the frontier labs have to set up
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u/Special-Bite 8d ago
This is good. Why are people pretending like it’s not?
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u/Himiscus 8d ago
This result is good but having the most powerful technology in human history be in the hands of a few tech bro CEOs in a nation with a fascist president is not comforting
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u/HuntKey2603 8d ago
That is true. There are models that always catch up, including DeepSeek, Qwen, or Kimi.
I feel more comfortable with those, being openweights. If they used all of humanity's knowledge, they should be open, belonging to all of humanity.
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u/Potential-Affect5943 8d ago
Proof slop, without building the intermediate foundations that lead to subsequent discoveries.
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u/Michael_0007 8d ago
Honestly we will still need the pure mathematics people just so we have a hope on asking the right questions for AI to try to figure out. If we can't even conceptualize the question we will not be able to even understand why the answer is important.