HN

Comments (219)

• amai
  Have blog posts replaced peer-reviewed academic papers when it comes to publishing advanced in science?
• Menu

  aabhay
  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?
• Menu

  robinhouston
  In a way the most remarkable thing about this is that it isn't even at the top of the HN homepage. Even if this is a step up from what we've seen before, we're no longer astonished by the idea that AI can make significant advances in mathematics and computer science.
• petilon
  At what point can we say AGI has been achieved? What is the test? AI is solving mathematical problems that humans have not been able to solve for decades. Is that not enough?Sam Altman has said "If superintelligence can't discover novel physics, I don't think it's a superintelligence." Is that the test? How far away are we from AI discovering novel physics? It seems within reach.
• Menu

  Chance-Device
  Pretty cool. The impact of AI is getting undeniable, there aren’t many positions left to move the goalposts to at this stage, next they’ll have to be outside the stadium entirely.The sooner people can be broken out of their denial about all this the better, and we can start actually taking it seriously.
• Menu

  ultimatefan1
  one of the early premises of how ai takeoff would go was that a system that could solve open problems in advanced mathematics would also discover novel advances in math and computer science that directly unlock drastically better software performance. we are seeing frontier level math breakthroughs (ie performance that would put it in the top 100 or 1000 mathematicians in the world if it were a human, meaning top .00001% or 800/8B). we are also seeing incredible advances in software performance. open ai announced like 15% improvement by fixing gpu kernel issues. these are clearly linked in the sense of scaling laws and generalization of intelligence: a huge model gets capabilities in both math and software engineering that isn't possible at smaller scales.but it seems less likely to me than before that the types of math/science discoveries will explicitly unlock better software performance. in some sense this fits our intuitions. when top tech companies use math PhD type employees, they have them stop doing pure math research and instead focus on software engineering. these people are often very good at software engineering but not due to recent discoveries in academic mathematics, it's due to their general intelligence. to me, this is evidence that the models are getting better but does not make me think we are on the cusp of a foom style fast takeoff enabled by revolutions in frontier math (i also posted this on twitter @mlipman13)
• Menu

  kcexn
  Not being an expert in any of the fields OpenAI has "advanced" I don't want to prematurely downplay the significance of this contribution. However, I am worried that the language they are using in this blog post is exaggerating for the sake of marketing.It is true there hasn't been a reliable computational approach to solving these problems before. But do these proofs contribute new ideas to the mathematical corpus, or are they simply an effective method to exhaustively search the literature for the right combination of existing tools to apply to the problem?Essentially, did these problems seem like they had an intuitive answer and were feasible to prove before, just not high enough value targets for an expert to invest time into? Or were they fundamentally difficult prior to this point and it appears that AI has done something more than just throw the problem into a big solver.
• ltitu
  So they are bribing 100,000 researchers with free accounts to work on their future unemployment.
• maxutility
  New advances in sphere packing? Let’s make sure AI doesn’t inadvertently engineer ice-9.
• Menu

  emil-lp
  I wonder what the total cost of this research was, including the salary for their mathematicians and engineers.
• Menu

  macleginn
  I am duly impressed by the powerl of the nameless internal AI, but not a single human contributor's name listed anywhere? Did someone at least make this model a coffee?
• ashivkum
  the people who crow in the comments of each of these posts about AI advances making human beings useless seem to bizarrely identify themselves with the AI, but none of them seem to have had any hand in building this technology. at best, they're power users. pure ressentiment.
• Menu

  avaer
  What happens when OpenAI et al stop being open about these things, and just pack it into the training?
• anon
  undefined
• Menu

  lifeisstillgood
  On the token limits etc - one assumes that OpenAI et al are able to “hire expert in field, and let them spend the equivalent of a million dollars of tokens” because they are not actually selling their complete compute 24 hrs a day, so the cost internally is a negligible (ish) electricity bill.Which is very suggestive - if after everything they are not fully loaded then the next gazillion data centres being built look unlikely to be needed.
• Menu

  danielrmay
  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 correctnessOffering 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?
• DrBazza
  Replace philosophers for mathematicians and Douglas Adams was spot on again.Whilst current models can't 'intuit' and come up with conjectures, they can certainly disprove some of them very quickly through the kind of grind that humans can't do. I suppose there really are some mathematicians out there today, whose last few years of study, have just been up-ended by this.--"Yes we are," insisted Majikthise. "We are quite definitely here as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons, and we want this machine off, and we want it off now!""What's the problem?" said Lunkwill."I'll tell you what the problem is mate," said Majikthise, "demarcation, that's the problem!""We demand," yelled Vroomfondel, "that demarcation may or may not be the problem!""You just let the machines get on with the adding up," warned Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?"
• Menu

  0x5FC3
  How much do you all think it would cost to "buy" these advances from PhDs, practicing scientists?
• Menu

  piker
  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.[edit: deleted a distracting comparison to Chess]
• Menu

  artninja1988
  Now that we've seen AI produce a fair number of proofs (and disproofs), I'm curious when we'll start seeing it build genuinely novel theory. Does anyone have predictions on when and how we'll get there and will it take new architectures/ training paradigms, or is the current approach enough?
• Menu

  christofosho
  I would love more time and money put into real-world problems by these companies. Climate, food insecurity, pollution, technology for convenience and/or to help people have a higher quality of life.I'm sure they must do some of this type of work, right?
• frenzyguy
  This is both awesome and terrifying for mathematicians, however some ideas can be generated and the field as whole expanded with the attention!However, I was looking at the proofs and reason explanation and openAI should be more explicit in how the work has flown. I find the models have jumped hoops in some places of the proofs, that can be hard to track. In fact, when a paper is published you usually get a review and if no reviewer understands they ask you to further explain the thought process. It will be fun to see if this happens here.
• anon
  undefined
• Menu

  bifftastic
  Any advances in theoretical physics yet? Are there any fundamental obstacles? I would have thought not, but I haven't seen anything reported.
• kingstnap
  It's remarkable how you can manage to get these models to produce remarkable breakthroughs like an explicit construction of a non-sofic group.And yet this is the exact same company that has screwed up their android app so bad that the latex N^3 rendering problem makes it so having it explain it to me crashes the app.Truly jagged beyond belief.
• Menu

  melagonster
  Wow, so this is the end of science :(
• Menu

  sashank_1509
  Meh, Humans should be doing this. It’s kind of retarded that we have AI automating creative problem solving, coding, music, arts, the fun parts of life before they can do my dishes, laundry and vacuum my house.They can’t even drive me anywhere I want, though I suppose they’re getting there. I don’t think LLM companies should be surprised when rest of society hates them. They’re literally bringing in a dystopian WallE like society where most demand for human work is destroyed.
• anon
  undefined
• Menu

  s_Hogg
  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
• amazingamazing
  Can’t wait for this stuff to have quality of life increases for the average person. So far all I see is that AI has made owning a computer more expensive, made some jobs redundant, increased spam and distrust with questionable authenticity of content and of course made some Americans very rich.
• readthenotes1
  I wonder if Erdos would be saying " It's fine that y'all are answering my questions, but who is asking better questions??"
• deyiao
  [dead]
• k2xl
  [dead]
• Menu

  utopiah
  [flagged]
• Menu

  luciana1u
  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
• Menu

  zkmon
  > 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.
• Menu

  xyzsparetimexyz
  Any implication of any of these findings? They seem like unimportant nerd snipes to me. If you want to do something actually relevant, get chatgpt to write a simulation of graphene nanotube construction and figure out how to do it at scale.