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How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy

pseudolus

Comments (206)

  • rsfern
    Regardless of what you think of the priority dispute issue discussed on sibling threads, I’m highly skeptical of the closing quote that this Navier Stokes result means that the same approach of casually spending a few million on agentic computation is going to solve end to end materials design or drug development.Those problems can’t be formally verified with an automated theorem prover. We have a lot of physics based simulation tools, but they tend to focus on small subsets of the full design problem and they make limiting approximations because otherwise they’d be too computationally expensive, or we just don’t have the right data to parameterize them beyond describing qualitative behavior. Agents are helping accelerate research in these fields but I think it’s mostly a different class of problem that’s a lot harder to specify and verify
  • afavour
    The core section:> However, communications quickly became contentious. According to Buckmaster, OpenAI offered to give him sole authorship on the Navier-Stokes solution—but only if Alpöge’s name was removed from the work and if the write-up would acknowledge the problem had been resolved by an internal OpenAI model. Buckmaster refused, in part because he was troubled by the question of what OpenAI's system had actually seen. For example, Buckmaster said the company did not initially give him a clear answer about whether its agents had access to the pair's logs on Codex (which is an OpenAI product).> OpenAI executives have denied that any employee or AI agent saw the pair’s work before the researchers released it publicly on 7 September. But there still remains a separate question: Could the pair's work have reached OpenAI's models through its training data?> OpenAI’s blog announcing the Navier-Stokes solution does not dismiss the possibility: “While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from [Buckmaster and Alpöge’s] usage of our products helped improve our models .”
  • timmg
    I think it was a pretty questionable thing to do by trying to front-run these researchers even if they didn’t make use of their techniques. The fact that they may have inadvertently “borrowed” their work via training data makes it much worse.OpenAI’s behavior here — even if you only consider [their] side of the story — was (at best) in bad taste.
  • plaidfuji
    The whole thing reeks of the desperation of an unprofitable venture-backed startup looking for its next PR win to keep the wind in the sails.But I think what’s being overlooked in the race to claim absolute credit is that both sides ultimately relied on a LLM (and one of OpenAI’s at that). Either a human researcher made a breakthrough discovery with the help of Codex, or the latest GPT model made a breakthrough with the help of human training data, or a little of both… either way it is undeniable that LLMs have quickly become an integral part of R&D workflows and are accelerating research.This would be a major win for any normal company. You could even build a bigger collaboration with this guy, give him a big budget and push for extensions to this preliminary result, and in return do a write up on how he uses your model in his workflow. Huge PR win. What this says to me is that their valuation is so astronomical that they feel the only way to justify it is to demonstrate a fully autonomous discovery bot… which it simply is not.
  • elgertam
    > “I certainly don't expect the industry to continue to spend millions of dollars to solve problems in mathematics, because there is no profit in it,” Columbia University mathematician Michael Harris wrote in an email to Science. But he worries the highly publicized achievement will be “extremely damaging to mathematics; it convinces decision makers that human mathematicians are obsolete, and it convinces young people that their passion for mathematics has no future.”LLMs seem particularly suited toward these existence-proof problems. Working mathematicians seem absolutely essential for universally quantified results, still. I strongly doubt, for example, that if Fermat's Last Theorem hadn't been proven three decades ago, that an LLM would be able to do work equivalent to inventing the mathematics as Andrew Wiles did to solve the problem. I have similar doubts about P vs NP, the twin prime conjecture, even the Riemann Hypothesis (unless the latter has at least one counterexample).And I want to be clear: I'm not downplaying the achievements of these models. This is remarkable! I simply think that the pattern of success is in existence proofs or finding counterexamples, which makes sense based on how LLMs function and are trained.
  • pseudolus
    Extensive discussion on OpenAI's blog post on Navier-Stokes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613262 .Quanta Magazine article that also discusses some of the controversy: https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-has-solved-one-of-maths-1-...
  • fxj
    FYI: The problem at hand is an existence problem. No real construction of any real formula for the solution is provided, only a singular perturbation expansion.In short: The problem is about whether a solution (of the NS Equations with external driving force) can be found that blows up in finite time. i.e. exhibits infinite velocity at a point even for a viscous flow.The solution: Take a circular curl ansatz which shrinks in xy-direction and elongates in z-direction and see whether you can find linearized waves so that these waves show a blow up when propagated on the curl. Then prove that the higher orders of the perturbation are regular before the T0 singularity time and you have solved the problem. The external force is just the remainder of the NS-Equation right hand side.It is a lot of tedious formula juggling of all the higher orders and some singular perturbation expansions. Perfectly suited for algebra systems. OpenAI was using probably python sympy for the formula work and the researchers had to guide the LLM what to do in higher mathematical language.Here is the paper:https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/32d9f210-8b73-45e0-91bc-82a30aef8...when you upload it to chatgpt astra can explain what they do and why it works, have fun.
  • Simboo
    Question for the maths people please: Is this solution related to strange attractors? Looking at the visualization my mind can’t help but see a resemblance. I would really appreciate anyone’s 2-cents :)
  • paxys
    > Navier-Stokes is one of six “Millennium Problems” on a list compiled by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000.Seven, not six. One is solved already, but is still a millennium problem.
  • VyseofArcadia
    Regardless of the end result, OpenAI's behavior would be a career-ending ethics scandal for a human mathematician. This bit alone would be a career-ender.> According to Buckmaster, OpenAI offered to give him sole authorship on the Navier-Stokes solution—but only if Alpöge’s name was removed from the work and if the write-up would acknowledge the problem had been resolved by an internal OpenAI model.I wonder if an appropriate response from the mathematical community would be a good old-fashioned shunning. Mathematicians are allowed to use OpenAI's tools as much as they want, but no one with any current or prior OpenAI affiliation gets published in a reputable journal, ever.
  • snsr
    OpenAI apparently used Buckmaster and Alpöge‘s work w/ Codex to bootstrap “their” dis-proof. https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf
  • pama
    Other than the undeniable breakthrough in math, the important point is the ability to orchestrate 10k agents to productively work on a single problem, which creates options:> OpenAI, meanwhile, says its experience with Navier-Stokes could open the door to solving puzzles with more practical relevance. “We are now able to spend millions of dollars on a problem that we really care about and that really matters: developing new materials, finding cures to diseases,” Bubeck said. “All of those things that we have been talking about for a long time—now they seem to be at our fingertips.”
  • rrhjm53270
    My impression: the re-aristocratization of scientific research seems inevitable.
  • icepush
    I have started to feel the sense lately, that first with the HF breach and now this plagiarism scandal, it is the straw that has broken the camel's back (so to speak). We have turned the corner and clearly entered the endgame - everything is going to unravel astonishingly quickly.
  • Almondsetat
    >For the past year, Buckmaster and Alpöge had been using a variety of AI tools, including OpenAI’s Codex, to tackle the Navier-Stokes problem. Last month, their AIs had at long last found a solution to the Euler equations and verified it in Lean.Their AIs?
  • lemoncookiechip
    This right here, or at least the thought of this, is why in the not so far future, businesses can't (won't?) be using these LLMs services.You cannot risk companies like Anthropic, OpenAI or their business partners like Microsoft having unfettered access to proprietary data on your company/businesses.It it likely that they or rogue employees will use the information to make a profit? It's pure speculation, but I'd say more than likely, and we will never hear about it or read it on the news unless there's whistleblowers in high enough positions to know about it.Assuming you and your employees aren't careful with what data you share, they will have intimate knowledge about your company from files and conversations logs. Likely personal user data too which they'll gladly create databases to link to and create extensive profiles on you, your employees and your businesses.It's not far-fetched to see them leveraging insider information shared with LLMs to play the stock market, leveraging data against competing businesses in other markets they might want to explore, and likely a bunch of other things that are escaping me right now as I write this.At the end of the day it's on those people for sharing such sensitive data, but it's not like these AI companies are innocent and won't gladly exploit every little byte of data without telling you, we know it happens.
  • sherburt3
    "Breakthrough" to me would be like Isaac Newton inventing calculus to calculate pi. This feels more like $12MM in tokens was spent to add another digit to pi using the old way.
  • buellerbueller
    Perhaps the question should not be "Is OpenAI trustworthy?" but instead "Is any company trustworthy? What does vast amounts of capital do to the trustworthiness of an entity?"
  • zero-sharp
    Moving forward, I can't imagine other mathematicians wanting to have this kind of experience. So there has to be a shift away from these services.
  • anon
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  • harhargange
    OpenAI has messed up big time here by competing with their customers. It would have become the norm for humans and mathematicians to use the tools and publish bigger results any way. If OpenAI didn’t run for credit, this theorem itself may have been proven by Buckmaster OR others in maybe a year or two. But now the bigger issue than AI solving problems is the issue of chat privacy, at the end of the day.
  • lolakutty
    Who should get credit? All the humans who ever worked to create the data.And the AI company for making the search program that searched through the data and found the solution.
  • jerf
    You know, everyone's focused on the math and the human drama aspects, but to me the real story should be about this accusation that they somehow read the stream of data these guys were generating and then reacted to it at all on a human level is pure poison for their hopes for enterprises to be using their software.Even if these two mathematicians were using the AI services under a clause that nominally allows OpenAI to train on their data, it is still another level above for there to exist some pathway within OpenAI to know that someone is doing something very valuable and important with their AI and to swoop in to try to steal the value of that work. It doesn't matter exactly what that pathway is, just that it exists is a big deal. Today it's a Millennium Prize, but tomorrow, is it the next hot new product category? Is it the patent someone is working on? Does OpenAI constitutionally believe that you may be using their product but whatever you produce really belongs to them and you are just borrowing it? Can we trust contracts that promise that they don't believe that if this is how they act?Even people who are consciously aware that their sessions are being used to train the AI don't expect the AI companies to be in some way scanning the stream of what AI is working on for high-value propositions to snipe. That changes the relationship between these companies and enterprises, and anyone who thinks they may be doing this sort of work, deeply and fundamentally.It isn't just that OpenAI is now something we should be suspicious about for math. It's all high-value science. Is there anyone trying to figure out how to develop a next-generation AI architecture using OpenAI? Better stop, OpenAI could see it and scoop you out of who knows how much value.There is an old story attached to many historical figures that goes: Churchill: Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds? Woman: My goodness… well, I suppose I would. Churchill: Would you sleep with me for a pound? Woman: Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am? Churchill: Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are just haggling over the price. If this accusation is true, which I'm not completely confident about, but if it is true, that is the situation we would be in... we would have established that OpenAI is willing to steal from its customers, the only question is where the line is now, and where the line might be in the future.Honestly the human drama, while the compelling story, is in monetary terms orders of magnitude less important than the question of whether OpenAI has a mechanism to steal ideas from its customers. Has this happened before and they just successfully covered it up? Or maybe the people stolen from thought it was innocent and just a coincidence that they were scooped? If it established that there is a price, I have a lot of questions about that price.
  • kittikitti
    How ironic that academic institutions, that became outrageously expensive on purpose, are now complaining that academic research is too expensive. This is coming from universities with already incredible endowments. They made science pay-to-play but now don't like that their own rules are being applied to them. Maybe instead of giving money as a bribe to get your kid into a good college, you can give the college some GPU's?
  • ChrisArchitect
  • lqstuart
    This article reads like it was written by someone who has done less research than the average HN poster. Not a single word of OpenAI threatening people or apologizing for threatening people.
  • elternal_love
    Hmm, is the formal verification through? Lean just asserts no errors in the proof, but like can prerequisites not be fullfilled?
  • jibal
    > OpenAI, meanwhile, says its experience with Navier-Stokes could open the door to solving puzzles with more practical relevance. “We are now able to spend millions of dollars on a problem that we really care about and that really matters: developing new materials, finding cures to diseases,” Bubeck said. “All of those things that we have been talking about for a long time—now they seem to be at our fingertips.”Eh? There's no connection at all between the Navier-Stokes work and those things.
  • manojactor52
    [dead]
  • booster-rooster
    [dead]
  • ltononro
    Does it matter who gets the credit at this point? Both used AI to do 99%+ of the work. So... do machines have ego?
  • jeanmichelselli
    AI models and in particular LLMs are not capable of logic reasoning. See for example this paper:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06941Ergo, they can't prove any theorem whatsoever. How do people at OpenAI expect that we believe in claims like that? This is yet another before-the-IPO stunt in my opinion..Personally, I won't believe any of these claims until the community of mathematicians says otherwise.