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Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/
55•milkshakes•59m ago

Comments

piker•40m ago
I don’t feel the existential dread of mathematicians is correct. It seems to me in fact these results are bringing math mainstream. I now personally look forward to the interpretations and discussions of the significance of such results by human mathematicians.

Now I understand that it’s mostly the super stars benefitting from the increased attention. Folks who are less established don’t share in that glory. But on the other hand it seems like an exciting time to go even deeper for in various specialties of math by deciding where to focus these powerful tools. For every conjecture defeated some seven or eight new ideas open up. Our path through that combination will be set by creative and curious human mathematicians.

Chess found a way to remain and grow with humans, and these other fields will too.

aabhay•34m ago
Given that we were nowhere near this state even two years ago, I think it’s a question of velocity more so than just distance.
traes•21m ago
Every time someone makes a comparison to chess I die inside. Chess is a spectator sport primarily funded by a few eccentric billionaires. Players artificially constrain themselves in timed environments knowing that they will never be able to produce better moves than a smartphone because a select few people find it interesting. Only ~30 top professionals actually make enough money to have a full career playing chess, maybe a few hundred more can sustain a meager lifestyle with coaching gigs. I shudder to imagine what will happen to the tens of thousands of non-Fields medalist caliber mathematicians if math goes the way of chess. Perhaps Terence Tao and a few other famous mathematicians will be funded by Peter Thiel to report on how well humanity can keep up with the machines? How do you expect any mathematician to be optimistic about this comparison.
anematode•13m ago
Fully agreed. As someone who both loves chess and works on chess engines... these comparisons to chess needs to stop.
ratmice•10m ago
Another noteworthy difference is that Stockfish is also gpl.
baq•14m ago
As in chess and go and also coding for the past ~year there are two groups of people: the disappointed and the enthusiastic. The disappointed are sad that they lost their advantage and that the craft they honed for years or decades has rapidly lost its value; the enthusiastic are excited about the future and what computers can bring to their domain and how it will evolve. I’m a bit of both if it comes to programming, more enthusiastic than disappointed, but also more than a bit terrified about the pace of it all. I imagine that’s how Kasparov felt back then, that’s how Lee Sedol felt and now that’s how Terry Tao feels.

The most disappointed folks will simply drop out, but the enthusiastic ones will keep going and with luck make up for the ones who decided to quit. Chess and go certainly went this way.

danielrmay•27m ago
I'm enjoying learning about these hard problems, but this line about credit made me chuckle:

> We helped prepare the manuscripts and formalize the proofs in Lean, and we take responsibility for their correctness

Offering to take responsibility for the correctness of a proof written in Lean feels like volunteering to be the fall guy in case someone finds a flaw in basic arithmetic, no?

emil-lp•26m ago
No, the correctness isn't for the "inside the Lean proofs", but for the translation of "human language math" and its formal Lean variant.
danielrmay•18m ago
I see. It still feels like a bit of an oddly solemn way of saying "this is the part we admit responsibility for"
emil-lp•17m ago
Well, to be fair, with Lean proofs, that's the only thing there is (unless I'm missing something).
baq•8m ago
It’s more than you get from free software - you get no proofs, no warranties and any responsibility of its authors are their pure good will. Reminder lean proofs are software!
traes•25m ago
I'm not an expert at it myself, but my understanding is there are numerous ways to "cheat" in a Lean proof (via `sorry` and similar). They're taking responsibility for fully verifying that none of these cheats were used (and that the theorem statements themselves were all correctly formalized.)
emil-lp•27m ago
I wonder what the total cost of this research was, including the salary for their mathematicians and engineers.
aabhay•27m ago
My main gripe here is the lack of transparency around the total experiment and construction. I doubt that they simply pointed their model at these ten specific problems alone and gave the model one shot; therefore the $2000 number could be completely misleading, similar to P-value hacking by not disclosing the total experimental setup.

I want to know:

1. How many total problems were given to the model, and what percent were left unsolved at what cost before giving up? 2. How many attempts did you give the model at solving these problems? 3. How expensive was the harness, e.g. did the model have access to a job cluster?

einpoklum•17m ago
Also, have there been examples of researchers not affiliated with OpenAI (or another LLM creator), who have done something similar?

Another question I have is whether or not OpenAI 'simply' hired capable combinatorics researchers to work on problems, and they have, and the use of the model is incidental / secondary to their work.

traes•9m ago
> Also, have there been examples of researchers not affiliated with OpenAI (or another LLM creator), who have done something similar?

A couple small ones that I've seen (example here [0]), but not anything of the magnitude that OpenAI and Anthropic have put out. Likely just related to token limits.

> Another question I have is whether or not OpenAI 'simply' hired capable combinatorics researchers to work on problems, and they have, and the use of the model is incidental / secondary to their work.

I think their output has reached a level that precludes this possibility, but I don't have any hard proof.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1uxj3cy/after_openais...

0x5FC3•24m ago
How much do you all think it would cost to "buy" these advances from PhDs, practicing scientists?
traes•15m ago
This isn't really a productive way to think about these things, IMO. It's quite possible it would take hundreds of years for any specific group of PhDs to solve them. Or one individual PhD could have the correct flash of insight and solve it in a month. There's absolutely no way to predict this, besides trying to gauge the apparent simplicity of the proof or counterexample (which is likely to be misleading). Until someone actually runs an experiment like this it's not a viable metric.
0x5FC3•11m ago
I understand and I am not trying to deny the impressiveness or the velocity of AI in general. But at some point we have to ask how much do we trust the labs at face value without much transparency of how they got to the results when there is trillions of dollars on the line.
simianwords•3m ago
The level of conspiracy theory is nuts
zkmon•19m ago
> claiming human authorship for a proof generated entirely by an AI system would misrepresent both the system’s contribution and the nature of genuine human intellectual work.

AI has no self-awareness. It's a tool. When you assemble a furniture using a screw driver, the torque force interacts with the molecular forces inside the metal and miraculously it transfers the force to the screw though a clever geometry design, communicating the force to the screw to turn it in a certain way.

Do you attribute the build to the tool? The "system's contribution" is helped by many other things all the way down to chips, datacenters and power generation. If the authorship requires attributing to a tool, then it should happen all the way down.

NitpickLawyer•16m ago
A better analogy would be a manufactured object, say 3d printed for simplicity. The 3d printer is given an input, and an object manifests itself after some time. We say that the creator of the object is the person turning on the machine, sending the data, and collecting the object. Not the machine itself.
cure_42•10m ago
I'd say the creator is the one who created the 3d model, not the one who pushed the print button.
NitpickLawyer•6m ago
My 3dprinter is special. It has a bunch of values + an algorithm (i.e. a neural network) that takes input as tokens and outputs a printed object.
esikich•14m ago
Your brain also is physical. Electrochemical gradients flow between physical molecular constructs. Isn't it just chemistry? Do you attribute it to physics or or some greater-than-the-whole idea?
s_Hogg•11m ago
I don't know why, but when I saw the source of this particular headline it reminded me of the album title 26 Mixes for Cash
defrost•8m ago
Ambient 0: Math for Airports
utopiah•8m ago
I'm seeing more and more of those ads on HN, it's annoying that AdBlock don't filter them.
luciana1u•6m ago
the real milestone isn't that AI solved ten math problems, it's that we now need a press release to tell us which ten problems count as important
DroneBetter•13m ago
well, a bug in the Lean kernel was discovered last week by way of an LLM tricking itself and its handler into believing it had found a non-constructive proof of the existence of a nontrivial Collatz cycle, see https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/117002106099986943 and https://lipn.info/@mevenlennonbertrand/116997917683191056
traes•4m ago
That seems to have been more of a sensationalized joke. Even your link has a disclaimer in it now. Read this chat from the researcher who did this:

https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/270676-lean...

naasking•14m ago
> AI has no self-awareness

What is your mechanistic model of self awareness that yields this conclusion?

> It's a tool

Does your model suggest that tools can't have self awareness?

raincole•6m ago
Sorry, OpenAI's take is correct here. If you're not convinced, here is one of the prompts they used: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/04d1d1e4-bc75-476a-97cf-49055cd98...

A slightly smarter highschooler can write these. I can write these. It's clear as day that the LLM, not the human did the heavy lift. It'd be ridiculous to give full credit to whoever wrote the prompt.

"Last month, you watched TV for less than an hour per day on average"

https://twitter.com/oohweehuman/status/2083162929369878606
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Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/
61•milkshakes•59m ago•38 comments

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