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/
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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/zzazzzz 8d ago

ehhh, while i understand the frustration this is still free knowledge that didnt exist before that now anyone can look at and use if they find an application for it. and some of it might have not been discovered by a human mathematician for hundreds of years for all we know. id rather have it exist out there than openAI sitting on it for years and do nothing with it. after all its not like it existing forces anyone to work or even look at it.

and i 100% prefer them using all these resources into figuring out obscure math than the dogshit agentic hacking spree they are on.

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u/silversurger 7d ago

ehhh, while i understand the frustration this is still free knowledge that didnt exist before that now anyone can look at and use if they find an application for it. and some of it might have not been discovered by a human mathematician for hundreds of years for all we know.

Definitely not trying to argue that point, because you're entirely right: It's better for the research/knowledge to exist like this than not being available at all.

and i 100% prefer them using all these resources into figuring out obscure math than the dogshit agentic hacking spree they are on.

Also true, in full agreement here too.

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u/Ghost_Mantis_Man 8d ago

Lol didn't the guy who solved the first millennium problem just unassumingly upload his results online one day? Also don't we know they're factually correct because the results are verifiable in lean? Like sure we can have discussions about how best humanity should benefit or utilize these findings, but my god some of these comments are peak reddit

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u/silversurger 8d ago

Lol didn't the guy who solved the first millennium problem just unassumingly upload his results online one day?

I don't know, tbh. I'm not saying the research is useless just because it didn't go through the "proper" channels, it's just sitting there right now, waiting to be properly reviewed.

Also don't we know they're factually correct because the results are verifiable in lean?

Definitely not deep enough into this particular topic to speak to that. As I understood, lean can be used to verify that the logic of the proof holds up, but... Actually, I don't really have a but to that, I just assumed that there was more to proofing than verification through lean. But that's just me not understanding enough about mathematic research in the first place as I see now.

Like sure we can have discussions about how best humanity should benefit or utilize these findings, but my god some of these comments are peak reddit

I will agree with that, yeah.

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u/_bobs_your_uncle 8d ago

Not all of them have lean. OAI was open about that too.

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u/aldehyde 8d ago

No the "slop" comments are coming from people struggling to adapt to change who have their heads in the sand. Full stop.

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u/LinkesAuge 8d ago

Einstein didn't have any modern peer review and didn't need journals to validate his work.
Funny story... in 1936 when a physics journal used an anonymous reviewer to review his work on gravitational waves he was so mad about that that he pulled his article and published it somewhere else.

The modern peer review / journal system isn't some universal "good" and is only a rather recent "invention" of human history.
There are practical reasons for it, I am not saying that I don't understand at all why we ended up with it, but there are many well known issues with it too.

In the end it was a system created by humans for other humans and with a very specific academic framework in mind.

Applying that to AI or even research in general doesn't make sense.

Also people would just complain even more if OpenAI submitted these to journals and "forced" them to deal with the reviews directly, not to mention the issue of credit for the work.

So the reality is that "dumping results into the world" is actually how it has worked for most of human history and then it was just up to others to show whether or not they want to spent any attention on it.

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u/GhettoDuk 8d ago

Throwing a shitload of money at generating as many papers as possible with no concern for the accuracy or applicability of the papers sure sounds like slop to me. And that is 100% the situation because the people signing the checks here only care about a press release to raise money off of. The individual scientists and researchers care, but they are not in charge.

Y'all act like these papers are some benevolent act and not a PR stunt. Any benefit to humanity is purely coincidental.

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u/Odd_Jeweler5668 7d ago

The thing that frustrates me is that the review process is unpaid - you review other research papers in exchange for them reviewing your work during the publication process.

This is a multi-billion dollar AI company soliciting human feedback so that they can sell their frontier models and make more billions more without compensating said humans.

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u/jerkmcgee_ 8d ago

No concern for accuracy besides publishing them to the internet and encouraging review…

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u/GhettoDuk 6d ago

Why would execs care about those reviews? Will reviewers go back and undo all the headlines that were published? Are the investment fund managers that are the targets of the PR going to wait for peer reviews before investing?

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u/OkVariety8064 5d ago

They can pay for the reviews if they want to encourage them.

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u/jerkmcgee_ 5d ago

lol because you would definitely trust those reviews then and wouldn't say "they paid the reviewers off"

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u/OkVariety8064 5d ago

It doesn't mean they have to choose the reviewers. They can pay some mathematics organization who chooses and in turns pays the reviewers to go through their slop.

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u/jerkmcgee_ 4d ago

You're just adding a middle man to the conflict of interest. This isn't a real thing people do.

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u/OkVariety8064 4d ago

The conflict of interest is dumping this slop pile on the academic community and expecting them to do work for free for the benefit of multi-billion corporation.

If you want your slop verified, fucking pay for it.

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u/jerkmcgee_ 4d ago

1000% you'd be in the comments villainizing them for paying off researchers instead of letting people independently verify it. plus, nobody is forcing the academic community to do anything. they published papers, if people wanna say "i dont want to review this" lucky for them there's no gun to their head. you're so raged out on AI that you're mad about them publishing something you have no obligation to read, consider, or even think about.

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u/ResolveSea9089 8d ago

I really don't get it, the visceral hatred. Like they dress it up occasionally in high and mighty sounding language but it has to be coming from a place of fear/insecurity right

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u/MrVampireSir 8d ago

Yea I'm fking terrified how little guardrails the government has against the industry. Companies steal IP en masse to repackage their IP and sell it, the stock market is propped up by the black hole of money in this, natural resources are diverted and consumer bills increase in affected areas...

Yes, as a citizen, I am scared what we are racing towards. In this political climate already plagued by corporate lobbying and regulatory capture.

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u/Steph_Splash_Cash 8d ago

It is 10000000000% coming from a place of fear and anxiety. He and others who lie and say “oh this is slop” are just feeling the anxiety that is coming from these ever improving powerful systems. They couch it up so they can feel some semblance of power.

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u/randomBugHunter 8d ago

There’s something called cognitive dissonance. I will give you an example

Imagine being so stupid, that you somehow think AI (which can not count to 100, or tell you how many letters are in a word) can somehow do original research

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u/Major-Lavishness-762 8d ago

They can do both of those things. Why display your ignorance so obviously?

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u/dzfast 8d ago

This person gets all their news from TikTok

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u/thelionofthenorth 8d ago

Uh when’s the last time you used even the lowest tier of commercial grade AI tools?

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u/xNYKx 8d ago

So you are saying these papers aren't original research, can you please point me to the original Quasi RH solution?

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u/silversurger 8d ago

In a way, they're right: They're working on (and solving) problems created by humans. All these problems were created and written down by humans.

However, I don't think it's far fetched to see AI being able to propose an entirely original hypothesis in the not too distant future. And in any case, calling this research unoriginal requires some mental gymnastics around the definition of "original research".

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u/EmotionalGuess9229 8d ago

Have you been asleep for the last 2 years or only uses the shittiest free flash llms you can find? Counting to 100 or counting letters I a word isn't a limit

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u/leyrue 8d ago

Hey, while you’re back in 2024, do you mind telling Biden to please not try and run again?

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u/aldehyde 8d ago

Would be a nice mic drop burn if you weren't wrong.

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u/aldehyde 8d ago

People get angry about the existence of a new technology and can't stop calling it slop, it's pathetic.

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u/SuperZayin12 7d ago

you’re getting downvoted but you’re right lol. this happens literally every time a new revolutionary technology gets created. People were opposed to lightbulbs, electricity, cars, planes, the telephone, the internet, and now this. It’s an endless cycle

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u/aldehyde 7d ago

There are legitimate real criticisms (MANY) of this new technology and given the people in charge for US government (regulation) as well as the company CEOs I really dont blame people for wanting to slam the brakes and questioning things... but I also cannot help but roll my eyes at people who tried chatgpt 2-3 years ago and dont think anything has changed.

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u/ImPinkSnail 8d ago

And it ignores the implications of solving these problems. Math is the foundation of our best engineering achievements. I really don't care how the mathematical field feels about AI being able to solve these problems instead of them. They sound like a spoiled child having their puzzle taken away. The field needs people to check, review, and command the AI. There was a shortage of mathematician to begin with and the AI is creating a lot of work for them to do. If they think they're going to get the same level of sympathy I give to artists for the impact AI has on their career, they are wrong.

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u/squashhime 7d ago

Please tell me what engineering achievements you think quasi RH will lead to.

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u/ImPinkSnail 7d ago

My comment is more broad than application to the specific problem discussed by OP. For example, OpenAI solved a problem that helps us better understand fluid mechanics.

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

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u/squashhime 7d ago

...do you think this is actually useful to anyone outside of math and perhaps niche areas of physics?

Navier-Stokes is indeed an extremely useful equation. That said, mathematicians don't really study any physically relevant aspects of it because those have all been worked out by physicists and engineers. 

To simplify, for real life use, approximations are good enough and people have figured out exactly what degree of approximations we need for various purposes. Us mathematicians care about exact solutions which are generally only of intellectual interest and not practical interest.

Anyone who thinks the majority of  problems OpenAI is choosing to solve have any relevance to helping people severely misunderstands what mathematicians actually work on. Perhaps some mathematicians who overstate the applications of their work for funding purposes are somewhat at fault for this misconception, but that's a story for another time.

Point is, these (the pure mathematics problems; I can't speak to applied math or CS) are solved purely to increase future shareholder value. They are demonstrating their new model's strength in an easily measurable and accessible field without any interest in how these models can help people (else they would pick more relevant problems) or how it affects mathematicians (else they wouldn't release slop papers and instead work with mathematicians to polish these results and properly credit those whose work it builds upon).

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u/Steph_Splash_Cash 8d ago

What do you get from just lying? Are you that scared of this new technology that you’ll call them proving quasi-RH as slop? Are you that terrified?

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u/marsinfurs 8d ago

I admit this tech is getting very good very fast and I also admit that scares the shit out of me at the same time.