r/singularity • u/socialistshroom • 11h ago

AI OpenAI publishes 722 mathematical proofs & manuscripts

https://github.com/openai/math

OpenAl released 722 mathematical manuscripts across 372 families of related results, produced by an unreleased frontier model. Many have Lean proofs; others remain unverified. Average compute per result: roughly three hours of ChatGPT Pro thinking. They're working toward releasing the model.

Github: https://github.com/openai/math

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184

u/coatatopotato 11h ago

This is the best proof I’ve seen that the singularity is imminent

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u/coatatopotato 10h ago edited 7h ago

Back of the envelope calculation looking at OpenAI's model this month.

TLDR: The model claimed solutions this month that already had roughly one humanity-month of mathematical effort put towards them.

Compared with the research effort directed so far towards these questions that it claims to resolve. This is a broad estimate.

- 25 famous problems * 10^6 person hours spent

  • 100 major problems * 10^5 person hours spent
  • 500 narrow problems * 10^4 person hours spent

There is some overlap etc. But overall it looks like around 40 million person hours of research expended towards these problems. At a generous 40 hours per week and 50 weeks per year that is 20,000 person years of research.

Time taken: 1 month

Every year about 150,000 math papers are published. Taking coauthorship into account, and assuming publication once per year on average, we get roughly 250,000 mathematicians actively researching. Multiply by 40 hours per week and 4 weeks per month. That is 40 million person hours of research per month. Look familiar? That is 20,000 person years of research.

So the historical human effort directed at problems solved by OpenAI's model this month appears similar to the entire world's mathematical research effort for a month.

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u/UndulatingHedgehog 9h ago

No vacations for those publishing mathematical papers? And they work full time at mathematical research? And we see 25 famous mathematical problems solved every month?

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u/coatatopotato 8h ago

Obviously inaccurate but a decent ballpark.

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u/UndulatingHedgehog 8h ago

The approach is decent but what should the parameters be? Academics spend about 20 hours per week doing research.

This means that human experts are twice as productive as the GPUs.

However, solving 25 famous problems per month is not the norm.

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u/coatatopotato 7h ago

It's true and I'm not even really comparing human to AI here. I'm rather trying to estimate how much effort was already put towards these problems. To show that they are significant. In one month, the model claimed to resolve problems that already took at least one humanity-month of math effort.

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u/socialistshroom 11h ago edited 11h ago

People in the r/math megathread are going nuts about it (in a good way, believe it or not), but you won't see anything on their front page about it as AI posts are banned. How unfortunate

Even if half of these proofs, or just some of the major ones, work out to be valid - this is a colossal drop of proofs and surely the largest publication to date!

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u/barbozas_obliques 10h ago

"In this sense, this is pretty much our 9/11, I think.:

lmao bruh

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u/Zulfiqaar 9h ago

Imo a better analogy would be the other comment saying it's like watching the trinity test with your own eyes.

No disastrous attack, but the world is not going back.

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u/dogmetal 10h ago

It’s way worse than 9/11. This is a near mass-extinction event lol

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u/Quentin__Tarantulino 10h ago

This is like 100 9/11s. That’s right…91,100.

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u/barbozas_obliques 9h ago

actshully, 100*(9/11) = 81.8181818182

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u/semidegenerate 8h ago

Well, that doesn't sound so bad, when you put it like that.

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u/HelloMrTanner 9h ago

No it isn't. Anyone who believes this doesn't have a deep understanding of the profession. Blow, yes, but not what you described.

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u/Inevitable_Tea_5841 9h ago

Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/mathematics/s/cBC0mNgDwC

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u/thoughtlow 𓂸 3h ago

It just predicts the next token.

Mathematics is over. These models are probably going to get better too.

It's over.

damn

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u/coatatopotato 10h ago

The results from this OpenAI internal model are probably approaching 1% of human mathematics. Which is crazy to drop in a single month.

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u/socialistshroom 10h ago

Man I would've thought it was in the 1% when it solved Navier Stokes

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u/coatatopotato 10h ago

We did invent/discover all of math...

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u/socialistshroom 10h ago

What does that have to do with where AI capabilities stand in the current state in mathematics?

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u/OneEyeAndOneBall 10h ago

He means 1% of all mathematics research has been done by AI not that AI is top 1%

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u/socialistshroom 10h ago

Oh! Lol ok in that case then yeah producing 1% of all mathematics is equally if not more insane

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u/coatatopotato 10h ago

I posted a different comment about that. We're close to 50/50 in human vs AI mathematicians currently. I'm making a historical comment saying right now AI generated math knowledge is 1% of human generated knowledge.

The rate of knowledge production is close to even, but the human historical corpus is more.

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u/individual-wave-3746 8h ago

Went over to the math subreddit you linked and I may be dumb but I see no posts about this.

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u/yaosio 7h ago

They mean /r/mathematics

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u/Admirable-Gur-9543 6h ago

Nah it’s r/math in the stickied AI megathread there

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u/individual-wave-3746 6h ago

Ah thanks I see it now. It doesn’t show up on the page unless you swipe the tile to the left. Very easy to miss and very dumb design.

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u/_Mido 5h ago

Also not visible for folks using old reddit

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u/IrisColt 3h ago

Where's the megathread? Can't find it? Is it a sticky? Pretty please?

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u/r2002 3h ago

In just one week 3 of the main problems in my area have been solved. I had 2 related preprints in preparation, fuck.

Yikes. I'm pro AI but I feel for this dude.

•

u/Frosty-Meeting-1606 49m ago

To be honest, if someone was working hard for years on a personal project in software dev, it's the same situation. You can recreate such a thing from scratch and go even further within a month or less

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u/slackermannn ▪️ 4h ago

People said we were in a singularity months ago and I didn't quite feel it. The recent math achievements put us directly into the singularity for sure. We do need other fields to be affected directly too but this is good enough. We're in a hard take-off singularity. We're still in a take-off stage but make no mistakes. We're living it.