"No we almost solved it."
"No way, it was AI all alone"
"no you used our data for train..."
"Guys, Guys calm! You did not produce any useful results!"
The discourse is (1) models are capable of making really impressive mathematical advances, usefulness is not in dispute, (2) the frontier AI companies aren’t being super transparent about information sources so it’s hard to know exactly how to evaluate the level of capability that was demonstrated, and (3) there are lots of kinds of math that is interesting and there are open questions about how to get there.
In particular this article highlights a particular open question I’ve seen discussed on HN before, which is that the particular proof strategy of finding a counterexample might be more amenable to RL than other strategies of proof that might be needed to resolve the other branches of the Navier Stokes problem (and probably other similar areas of math)
If they spent about 10 GWh solving the problem (was it solved?) then that is much much more than 500 lifetimes of a human brain working.
I’m very anti AI and OpenAI, and do think it’s a pretty interesting finding! Very likely not worth their spend, but interesting and novel nonetheless the less
Next year's headline: But did Skynet kill all humans?
Only someone who has never interacted with mathematics outside a rote-problem-solving capacity would describe it as you have.
SciAm writes "in a sense, the LLM found and exploited a loophole in the framing of the question". This is pure sensationalism. Choosing option (C) (out of an explicit list of four options) is neither a "loophole" nor something "found by the LLM"; everyone involved knew this was the option they were pursuing.
With the grumbling out the way, there is some actual scientific content to the article: there's a strong argument that OpenAI's method will not extend to the unforced case, leaving our understanding of NS incomplete. This negative result is itself new and interesting (and predicated entirely on the solution found by OpenAI)!
That is the best response I've heard to this argument. Assuming the solution is correct, the fact it is not the most interesting solution that could have been solved is besides the point. The team at OpenAI did an incredible job solving the problem.
bmacho•11h ago
For a counter-example the latter is easier since you can have a tricky external forcefield.
tomjakubowski•1h ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wEn9B7pDV4