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Comments (230)

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  stillpointlab
  I think OpenAI deserve credit for adjusting their approach after the last math drop. I think Terrance Tao shares some credit here for galvanizing the response.Including the relevant mathematicians and scientists before dumping this onto the public is sure to go a long way to relaxing fears in those communities. I'm not sure how they will deal with accusations of favoritism but at least they are demonstrating a willingness to participate in a process.I hope the community can express some positivity that will encourage OpenAI and other foundation labs to continue with this collaborative approach.
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  abetusk
  ETH is false! I really would not have believed it.[0]:> We give a deterministic algorithm for exactly counting the satisfying assignments of an arbitrary k-CNF formula. For every fixed k ⩾ 2, on a formula with n variables and m clauses, our algorithm uses $poly_k (n, m)$ space and runs in time $(n + m)^{O_k(1)} 2^{n/(\log n)^{1/2 + o(1)}}$The dominant term there is (roughly) $2^{n / (\log n)^{0.5}}$, so still superpolynomial but less than exponential. Fucking wild.[0] https://github.com/openai/math/blob/main/preprints/The-Expon...
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  SilverSlash
  In 2025, Hong Wang won the Fields Medal for proving the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions. Here, OpenAI is claiming to have solved a stronger problem that proves the Kakeya conjecture in all dimensions!That's so insane to me. This top mathematician (and colleagues) at her pinnacle spent years proving it in three dims and now OAI proves it in every dimension...
• ChaitanyaSai
  Think openai should start including visual and interactive explainers in these where the viewer can toggle level to get a more accessible/technical explanation as needed. Would also be a great demo, and perhaps increasingly essential for us to know that explainability is not lagging behind provability.
• martinhath
  ETH is false! This is one of the big long-standing hypotheses that I actually remember from university, and afaik, it was reasonable to assume it would be true; reasonable enough for a lot of papers and results to assume this for bounds or hardness proofs of common problems in parameterized complexity, anyways.Also glad to see that one of the authors of the paper stating it is also in the loop here.2026 is weird.
• astrobiased
  This is an exciting time, but also there are very real changes at hand. Game changing discoveries will likely not happen at universities but at private AI frontier labs. Moreover, the models that are used on this are not always open to the broader community today.What will it be like in two years? Will such models that help enable paradigm shifts in science be only accessible to employees of those private companies? Still thinking about the ramifications ... amazing and discombobulating at the same time.
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  lukeplato
  > Our models produced a natural language proof for Yang–Mills existence on September 9th, 2026, and then subsequently produced a proof for QCD on September 18th, 2026. Given the length and complexity of the work, we postponed release until the Lean formalization completed. We finished our formalization of Yang–Mills’ existence on October 16th, 2026, which led us to develop the collaboration described hereabsolutely insane
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  mlinsey
  I understand that the Exponential Time Hypothesis being false doesn't necessarily mean P=NP, but for people who are a lot more knowledgeable about complexity theory, does this update your priors significantly in the direction of P=NP?
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  Daniel_Van_Zant
  Lots of progress recently in formally verifiable domains. Really curious if this is a product of the machine learning folks behind most large language models being much more likely to have a background in math, physics, etc. Or if it is that large language models have some fundamental limitations in the more "scruffy" sciences like biology.My guess is that in formally verifiable domains you can use RL-esque processes to get lots of good high-quality training data with reward signals (does it verify?), but the same does not apply to "scruffier" work. I would also imagine that the data volume of high-quality scientific work in "scruffy" domains is too low for the large language models to have a good manifold for "high-quality biology research". Would love to be proven wrong if anyone knows of anyone doing great scientific work with large language models in non-verifiable domains though.
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  krackers
  https://github.com/openai/math/tree/main/preprints/The-Expon...>We give a deterministic algorithm for exactly counting the satisfying assignments of an arbitrary k-CNF formula [in superpolynomial but subexponential time]
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  rbranson
  The title buries the lede quite a bit:> The Exponential Time Hypothesis is false
• levocardia
  Oh and also:>Our models produced a natural language proof for Yang–Mills existence on September 9th, 2026And presumably they are just missing the "mass gap" part of it.Very clearly these were the results of taking big swings at all millenium prize problems.
• martincsweiss
  Thurston wrote about this in “On Proof and Progress in Mathematics,” including how his own approach changed from proving theorems to helping a community understand the mathematics.Nicolas Le Roux, a Lagrange Prize winner / prof / strong mathematician, turned me onto that around the time I finished my PhD in ML last year. I have been thinking about it a lot, lately, for obvious reasons.At first, it felt silly to grapple with what science is only after finishing a PhD. This publication from OpenAI finally pushed me over the line to publishing an essay about this struggle between AI science and human science: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50253759
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  rcr-anti
  Well, this is certainly different, can't say they ignored the criticism. Wonder if this is a monkey paw curls moment; if the findings continue to accelerate, most of it just isn't public now.
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  mindwok
  It is mind blowing that these long-standing conjectures and open questions are just falling by the dozen every other week. What a time to be alive.
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  Kotlopou
  Regarding Yang-Mills, as of a few weeks ago there has been some expectation that this (specifically completing Balaban's program for the existence part without the mass gap) could happen, though from the Anthropic side: https://nitter.meowing.monster/ElliotGlazer/status/211115394...(Elliot Glazer seems in general to be a pretty good source to follow, however he does that...)
• 3abiton
  I am not sure if I side with Tao on this, or 3B1B. It's already causing quite a kerfuffle (to say the least) in the academic communities. This is the new norm now.
• qnleigh
  I thought it was interesting that in the original drop of papers, they announced much more progress on most other Millenium problems than on Yang-Mills existence. At the time I thought this might mean that it was a more stubborn problem, but it turns out that they had made a lot progress after all.The Yang-Mills Millenium Problem has two parts though. The second part is to show that Yang-Mills theories have a mass gap, meaning that the lightest particle has non-zero mass. This is important because experimentally we know that there is a mass gap, so the theory must have one too to in order to actually be the correct model of nature. I wonder if they again have unannounced progress here.
• robswc
  I'm incredibly skeptical about everything these frontier labs put out. Results are results though.However, could someone with a firmer grasp on the problems weigh in on how much are these recent results are function of cutting a virtually unlimited budget for some very smart people? I believe the LLMs certainly help iterate on ideas faster... but I am aware of very impressive work that goes on in quantitative finance. Stuff that would not really be published. That stuff is the result of paying smart people millions to produce results which produce $$$.I have to wonder, would this have been solved if we simply gathered tons of smart people and paid them a ton of money to solve it? Or is it exclusively because they had access to LLMs?Could they have achieved this result with previous versions of ChatGPT?
• auntienomen
  The QCD and Yang-Mills results don't seem to go beyond what the experts know/expect. Basically, they're saying there is a path integral measure, but shrugging when asked what functions are integrable with respect to it. The latter question is key for mass gap and confinement, and existence of the measure only means that the question of whether a mass gap exists makes sense.
• adverbly
  > In our view, these manuscripts are best understood as a form of raw research data.Much better!> For the computer science collaboration, the group has decided to make the natural language proof and Lean formalization public immediately, and we are publishing them directly to our GitHub repository. For the physics collaboration, the group has decided to hold off on releasing the AI-produced artifacts and instead work on writing it up themselves.> All of these approaches involve tradeoffs. On the one hand, the collaborations empower experts to foster unpacking the results and contextualizing them in the broader academic community. On the other hand, choosing initial shepherds necessarily shapes who gets involved first and creates asymmetry of information. We welcome feedback on how to broaden participation and make this process more useful.Very good!I was highly critical of their approach with the earlier mathematical publications, but this is much improved.Most importantly, they aren't releasing slop papers that would never have been published in any self-respecting journal or made it past a deep round of peer review questioning.> We are committed to ensuring funding for researchers to independently examine, explain, and build on the results above.> We continue to invite feedback on the best way to disclose results and engage with scientists to accelerate discovery.Well done!Now you need to actually LISTEN to the community and the feedback, so you aren't done yet, but this is a much better start than last time. Keep it up!
• pfdietz
  They resolved the Kakeya conjecture in every dimension! This is very big news; the resolution in dimension 3 was just recently.
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  doctoboggan
  I wonder why the physicists are the only group to not want the full information released upfront? As a casual fan of physics[0] it seems like their completion of the standard model is possibly the biggest deal of all these breakthroughs, am I wrong?[0]: PBS space time watcher
• georgeburdell
  I do not like this at all. At best, we find that there are classes of problems that even AI cannot help much in solving, in the sense that the rationals are an infinitesimally small part of the reals. At worst, a fundamental result trivializes a problem whose complexity is a key component of a critical system, and there’s societal upheaval. If PhDs ran the government, and thought the latter, we might have already seen military attacks on data centers.
• zone411
  These resolve 6 entries in my top 500 open problems list (LLM ranked, https://www.proofatlas.ai/open-problems/) and there is partial progress on #3 overall (Yang–Mills Existence and Mass Gap):Kakeya conjecture — #38Fourier restriction conjecture — #46Local smoothing for wave equations — #187Bochner–Riesz conjecture — #190Exponential Time Hypothesis — #43Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis — #63
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  nilamo
  I'm a little surprised the article stresses Lean programs so much, without ever stating what that is or why it somehow proves something. Maybe that's expected knowledge for this sort of thing.https://lean-lang.org/
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  artninja1988
  I wonder how much compute they are throwing at problems in ML like continual learning and sample efficiency. Also how successful they are with these. Results like in the post make me hopeful we'll see some type of so singularity soon
• nixonaddiction
  this is the first time one of the big labs has published anything related to my field. and i'm actually pretty excited? im more on the applications side of QFD than the theory side of things, but gosh i actually cant wait for the results to be released to see if i can use it for anything! i kinda hope more results come out, in more ways relevant to what i do, its so cool to see any sort of progress! wow!
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  dooglius
  The proof appears to be a sub-exponential algorithm for #3-SAT not just 3-SAT, I think this is considered a much stronger result?
• lacoolj
  Dont even care anymore. Its an AI discovery.If it's human, at this point, we will see it in the title
• vatsachak
  The proof of the Kakeya conjecture is amazing. Only 54 pages. Will probably lead to a lot of theory.As a non abelian harmonic analysis PhD I am very happy
• rhedak
  The question is what are these discoveries going to mean in the long run.
• bar8uyr
  Billy Connolly quote: Aye, did yer
• anon
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• measurablefunc
  Someone should take the sub-exponential proof & write something executable.
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  stabbles
  > In our view, these manuscripts are best understood as a form of raw research data. To convert this raw research data into scientific understanding, in this release we are experimenting with a new approachMathematics and computer science are turning into an empirical science
• anon
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  AIorNot
  Scott Aaronson of Shtel Optimzed and now at OpenAI has a great podcast episode discussing this -worth watchinghttps://youtu.be/3yXtXTwz4J4?si=mmePkdRBQrlO3BlD
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  metalsiliconYT
  OpenAi needs to stop trying to please everyone. Just release the findings and give all the credit to your models/collaborators.
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  titzer
  I'm going to be the cynical one and offer this translation: "Our results are too important to wait for the pesky peer review, so we are dumping a whole ton of money in a fund and giving some elites a breathless first look so our buzz keeps getting jacked up."The reality that Science is a grind and there are thousands of new results every year discovered by regular humans who use a regular human process to cross-check and review.Treating every result from the AI like a gift from god is getting tiring.
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  brcmthrowaway
  I'm too dumb for this.. but does this mean PKI is doomed?
• anon
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  jwpapi
  Honestly, I’m a bit scared but also a bit excited.I’m currently reading Africa by John Reader which covers a lot of humanity storyline. From HN I get the humanity achievements that are happening right now.The feeling digesting both daily is in order of magnitudes bigger than what any really exciting tv show did to me.I honestly at this point don’t know anything about what could be possible and what couldnt.I understand that this is really freightening, but also especially ETH being false gives even more hope that some fundamental problems could be solved in our lifetime, for example understanding universe, aging, colonization of planets and also our limits. I know I’m the minority, but these answers really interest me.
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  esalman
  Working with academic communities lol.I looked over the announcement for any substantial contribution, and found they're donating $5 million to a research foundation.$5 million might sustain 5-10 PhD students for 5 years.Maybe it's just me but I think they should contribute more in exchange for forcing the scientific community into paying for tokens to generate slop and then pouring their time into verifying or falsifying the slop.
• casualscience
  Where are the fucking papers???
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  wilg
  In my opinion its okay for them to work on science and math problems and release the results.
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  Kotlopou
  "In our view, these manuscripts are best understood as a form of raw research data."They are staying on top of the exact formulations that spread like memes. I think this one was unfortunate. It's an analogy for a new type of thing that stops attempts to figure out what thing that is.That said, uh, let's go? Let's see if OpenAI earns some goodwill here. It probably can't go worse than the last math drop!
• hei-lima
  Terrible title. I was hoping to see more interesting comments on the story, haha!
• dyauspitr
  What a fucking time to be alive. I love it.
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  Rudybega
  To give some context:Kakeya / local smoothing (math): The result would resolve the Kakeya conjecture and Stein’s restriction conjecture across all dimensions together. Mathematicians had been making progress one dimension at a time, so this would settle a whole family of central harmonic analysis problems at once.ETH is false (computer science): ETH has been used as a computational hardness premise in hundreds of papers, so a disproof would undercut a large body of existing complexity results. It would also change what researchers think is achievable for efficient computation.QCD existence (physics): It would give a rigorous mathematical foundation to the theory of the strong force, which physicists have used for decades without proving it’s well-defined. It also bears on a Millennium Prize Problem.
• paxy
  Title is no doubt crafted to get ahead of the usual online backlash, but here’s the actual announcement:> We are announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics about harmonic analysis, complexity theory, and quantum field theory.1. Local smoothing and the Kakeya conjecture2. The Exponential Time Hypothesis is false3. Existence of quantum chromodynamics and completions of the Standard Model
• grd_dev
  [flagged]
• mentalgear
  "Working with PR to make us look less like cheating mind leeches".
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  calf
  In the Star Trek Voyager capstone episodes titled "Scorpion" parts 1 & 2, Chakotay explains to Janeway the behavior of the Borg through the parable of the fox and the scorpion making a transactional deal to cross the river together. After reaching the shore, the scorpion stings the fox, and the dying fox asks why. The scorpion replies, "Because it is in my nature."(Upside of the story is Captain Janeway's trusted crew works together to formulate a trick up their sleeve precisely in case of predicted contingency...)
• Insimwytim
  Wow, math PR really took over, nevermind blowback from those pesky mathematicians.Let's throw in more of that stuff, so they wouldn't look at the financials.Yay, shills are here with downvotes!
• 1ahsgt
  I wonder how many prompts for proof approaches they stole for these. Nothing on how many tokens were burned.Proud to funnel money through the Simons Foundation, which is an AI booster itself and completely aligned with OpenAI.They make it very hard to enjoy a single result with the business and the politics being so dirty.
• aborsy
  Science is getting out of the reach of the majority of people. In particular, EU is out of it mostly.
• anon
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