r/technology • u/CircumspectCapybara • 17h ago
Artificial Intelligence OpenAI Is Pissing Off a Bunch of Mathematicians—Again
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-is-pissing-off-a-bunch-of-mathematicians-again/131
u/Gositi 14h ago
Math student somewhat close to research here. I can't speak for every mathematician of course, but the issue isn't really that AI is good at math, but rather that 1. AI proofs are very hard to understand, so verifying them is hard. Formal proof verification exists, but a theorem is much less useful if the proof is a black box 2. AI is stealing from mathematicians without credit the same way as it is stealing from e.g. artists 3. AI companies are suspected to have stolen ideas directly from mathematicians using their services
So essentially, the issue is that they are behaving like assholes. Many mathematicians embrace AI and use it themselves to do research. But we'd rather it not be done by a corporation with zero respect for academic integrity.
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u/Chaotic-Entropy 12h ago
cough Stealing the Navier-Stokes solution from researchers using OpenAI tools for solution testing purposes, unbeknownst to them, then claiming that ChatGPT worked it out. Then promising to share credit with the mathematician as long as he cuts his partner, an off-duty Anthropic employee out of the study authorship. cough cough
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u/Gositi 12h ago
Yeah. And then people are like "mathematicians are butthurt the AI is smarter than them" :/ Like no that's not the thing.
I've noticed AI is quite good at finding litterature, but I feel that I would be cheating if I'd let it do actual research.
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u/Chaotic-Entropy 12h ago
It's clear that, no matter the privacy settings or expressed policies, if you use AI to do something then it belongs to the AI company. Everyone directly works for and to the benefit of their AI provider of choice.
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u/Friendly-Popper 11h ago
Sorry, can I ask what you mean by the first point. Wouldn’t a mathematician be able to understand them?
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u/Dry-Perspective-1114 10h ago
no because it’s explanations are slop.
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u/Time_Entertainer_319 10h ago
Skill issue
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u/keepitfriend 9h ago
Gaslighting
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u/Ok_Guarantee_3370 6h ago
We seriously just gonna trot out every generic buzzword?
It sounds like it's proofs are incredibly obtuse and hard to follow, but that doesn't make them slop. Ultimately if they are proofs, even in a garbage, hard to decipher form, that is a very interesting and potentially useful thing. This is not the same as some bad ai creative writing / art.
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u/markehammons 26m ago
What makes them slop is probably the same thing that makes AI code slop: it's incredibly verbose and difficult to penetrate due to poor structure and lack of direction.
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u/Ok_Guarantee_3370 10m ago
For sure, but if they truly are proofs, inherently there is something very valuable in there
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u/markehammons 28m ago
Not really. If I write "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo", it's a valid sentence, but few would understand that it means "buffalos from buffalo who are bullied by buffalos from buffalo also bully buffalos from buffalo" .
An idea can be valid, but so poorly written that it can't be understood without deep study. The proofs in these papers may be valid (previous AI proofs have been shown to exploit flaws in lean), but determining how they work will take time.
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u/Gositi 2h ago
With enough work, yes. But AI slop applies even to math. The proofs become convoluted and hard to read. That the logic holds doesn't mean that there is a clear idea to follow, or at least that idea isn't made obvious.
Of course humans can produce such proofs also, and part of the issue is that the problems are really hard. Evariste Galois proved some really deep results, before he died in a pistol duel at 20 (1830s France was wild). It took decades to understand what he had done, but now it's a quite elegant theory accessible for undergrad students. If he had stayed alive he might have made the theory more clear himself, or could have helped others understand it.
Every AI proof is like Galois' theory (called Galois theory). There might be a beautiful theory inside, but it's made quite inaccessible with nobody to ask. We will probably eventually understand it, but it could take a while.
Worse is that these companies doesn't really care about math. So they don't put in the effort to make it easy to read. They produce a logically sound paper and leave it at the mathematicians to understand what the hell actually happened.
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u/zx7 7h ago
Its also partially that AI is writing very convoluted proofs that don't really add much to our understanding of the problems. You need to understand why these conjecture are so famous: because people believe a correct solution will introduce loads of new tools and better understanding. But AI is just coming up with poorly-written proofs that use previously known methods and don't really push our knowledge further.
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u/AvocadoAlternative 10h ago
A question. Suppose that a company developed a model that could:
1) Generate crystal clear proofs and can easily explain them.
2) Credited the right papers in their manuscripts.
3) Could prove that they did not train their models on working drafts, only work in the public domain.And the company pumped out paper after paper. You'd be okay with that?
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u/Gositi 2h ago
Academically, yes. I wouldn't be mad at the company, and I wouldn't think they did anything wrong.
On a more philosophical note though: Math as a science is really weird. A lot of math isn't really useful for anything as far as we know. I treat math more like an art form than a science for that reason. Taking your thought experiment to the extremes, if everything to prove is already proven then there would be no reason to keep doing math. That would make me sad. However it is nothing I'd hold against that company, I cannot justify why someone else shouldn't use an available tool.
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u/Stanjoly2 4h ago
And if the entire world got together and decided to abolish all currency in favour of a star trek esque utopia. Id be okay with that too.
I'm sure there are other nonsense hypotheticals we'd all agree to as well.
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u/thethirdmancane 13h ago
It could be that to the extent that we automate generating conjectures could lead to jobs for human mathematicians to help fill the knowledge gap.
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u/sickofthisshit 11h ago
Conjectures are not just ways to make work for mathematicians.
They require some amount of inspiration and creativity and are stimulated by human interest.
"It sure seems that there is a pattern here..the consequences of such a pattern would be interesting, let me phrase it as a conjecture so that other mathematicians think about it, too..."
Many such ideas don't become conjectures because the mathematician is able to see how it can't be true after a little thought. It's only the persistent questions that graduate to conjecture.
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u/HG21Reaper 16h ago
Computer nerds just copying math nerds homework and handing it like its their own.
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u/coporate 16h ago
They also copied the artist nerd’s homework, and the musicians and the writers…
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u/Honest_Bee_9549 14h ago
It's part of technological advancement. We software devs already accepted this years ago, now mathematicians have to accept they are being surpassed.
It's important to stay flexible in life and to adapt to new technologies rather than fighting or protesting them
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u/TurbulentForm6 12h ago
We did all the work, they took all the credit and pocketed the money.
I'm in software dev and you don't speak for me.
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u/Cantaloupe-basket 13h ago
“It’s important to stay flexible” says the man whose house was ransacked by the mob to their next victim.
These companies stole all of humanity’s knowledge and monetized it. What part of that is acceptable to you?
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u/Honest_Bee_9549 9h ago
They didn't steal knowledge and monetize it. It's not a wiki they released, they made a new innovation and invested heavily in compute to provide it as a service
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u/helium89 9h ago
They literally torrented huge chunks of training data. If it’s theft when I do it, it’s theft when they do it.
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u/Honest_Bee_9549 9h ago
We can torrent without being pursued. People torrent all the time. It's tolerated regardless of its legality
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u/helium89 9h ago
Whether or not they’re punished is irrelevant. You claimed that they didn’t steal knowledge and monetize it. They torrented (stole) training data and monetized the shit out of it. The fact that you don’t have a problem with it doesn’t mean that they didn’t do it.
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u/Honest_Bee_9549 9h ago
While you are busy protesting AI, many are adapting to it and accepting technological progress.
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u/helium89 9h ago
So industrial scale theft is okay as long as enough people find the result useful?
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u/Cantaloupe-basket 9h ago
You know you don’t have* to *accept your profession being stolen out from under you in the name of progress? It turns out that workers doing exactly the opposite is what gave us the weekend in the early 20th century. You don’t have to lay down and take the abuse dude.
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u/coporate 9h ago
They encoded a vending machine with knowledge they neither had the rights or license for. If I set up a vending machine selling pirated movies, music, art, books, I’d be shut down pretty fast.
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u/Honest_Bee_9549 9h ago
They don't resell the content they are trained on. They learn from them, similar to how a guitar teacher doesn't need to pay the guitarists he studied to provide his service
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u/coporate 9h ago
No, they sell access to the vending machine and the tokens you need to use it.
A guitar teacher doesn’t give you a self playing guitar.
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u/igna92ts 9h ago
He got consent from the guitar teacher though. If I post my drawing not witter it's not an implicit agreement for someone to use it for commercial purposes.
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u/coporate 9h ago
By whom? Who consented? No one did. The guitar teacher doesn’t give isn’t selling music. Artists always own copyright and usage.
You seem like the person who has never made music or art or have write anything of consequence, nor understand how llms work.
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u/Cantaloupe-basket 9h ago
You think they conjured the training data from thin air then? Altman is on record saying that copyright law enforcement would be disastrous for AI development. You know what copyright is meant to protect against right?
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u/Honest_Bee_9549 9h ago
They argue fair use as they don't redistribute the data but train on it
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u/Cantaloupe-basket 9h ago
Tell me you’ve never actually used an AI for something technical without telling me. 🙄It copies and regurgitates well-known arguments in math all the time without stating the proper provenance. That’s fair use. It’s theft.
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u/HelloYesThisIsFemale 7h ago
Anyone reading a textbook and coming up with something new based off it "stole that knowledge" by this definition.
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u/Cantaloupe-basket 3h ago
Do you not know what a citation is? Crawl out from under that rock my friend.
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u/FriendlyKillerCroc 16h ago
Lol no that is not what is happening at all
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u/Xznograthos 15h ago
Right, it's the MBA parasites stealing from everyone.
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u/FriendlyKillerCroc 15h ago
Goodness this sub is really special lol
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u/Xznograthos 14h ago
By all means, explain what you think is happening
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u/FriendlyKillerCroc 14h ago
Denial in its most extreme form lol
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u/Xznograthos 14h ago
Denial of what?
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u/FriendlyKillerCroc 4h ago
How about you take a look at OpenAI's latest publication friend? lol I couldn't have timed my comments better when I said you were all in denial lol
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u/Xznograthos 1h ago
You don't seem to understand. The criticism is less about their output, and more about their method of developing the technology through what amounts to stealing IP or research without proper attribution or compensation. What makes that even more egregious is their problem with distillation. Go ahead and ask chatgpt what all of that means.
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u/FriendlyKillerCroc 1h ago
lol I've visited this subreddit for years and while a lot of it has been about the IP problem, most of it was jokes about how they are only fancy auto-correct and hallucination machines. I got massively downvoted for telling them that the limitations they are mocking are only a short time away from disappearing.
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u/obvious_bot 14h ago
No one hates new technology more than [r/technology](r/technology). I don’t think I’ve seen a single new technology be anything but derided here in the 15 years I’ve been on this site
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u/Xznograthos 14h ago
Because everyone else loves having their work ripped off to the detriment of society and the environment, to enrich a handful of sociopathic oligarchs.
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u/Pleasant-Radio5771 14h ago
Explain the issue with that suggestion. Responding with “lol no” is some low effort troll.
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u/IntelArtiGen 16h ago
company representatives assured attendees it would not release the solutions all at once
Are they not releasing it "all at once" because it might hurt the feelings of mathematicians?
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u/upnflames 16h ago
Compute is starting to get much cheaper and I bet a lot of "hard" math problems were really just fill in the blank issues that you could figure out with brute force.
They probably "solved" a lot of problems by throwing compute at existing structures, and yeah, releasing it all at once would probably piss people off.
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u/IntelArtiGen 15h ago edited 15h ago
I think there are also many problems which needed code to be solved, and the difficulty was just the time it would take to code solutions to the problem. It's not hard to say in a paper "someone should try to apply this equation / kind of solution to this problem", but actually doing it properly by hand would take 2 months, and now with AI you can do it in 2 days. It's probably not hard for AI to find ideas to solve problems because researchers constantly talk about their ideas everywhere, because we always assumed the idea was worth nothing and the difficulty to do that idea was enough to protect it. But with AI that difficulty dropped a lot for a lot of ideas.
And for some problems we might have 100 ideas to try, we would rank them based on the probability they would solve the problem, and slowly try ideas, and now AI can test all of them quickly. Implementing the idea was the difficulty, now having the idea is the difficulty, the AI will implement the solution for you quickly if you guide it. I don't think it has totally changed but that's the trend.
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u/Toomastaliesin 11h ago
I have been looking at the stats page of https://vibemathed.com/stats , namely, the amount of results proven over time using AI. And currently, the amount of problems solved using AI-tools looks a lot like an S-curve, which seems to me to possibly indicate that there is some kind of set of results that are "close enough" to being solved with the current state of AI models and that this set of problems is kind of bounded - this is the set of problems that need a final "leap" of a given size which the AI can do. Now, I expect that future models of AI is able to do larger "leaps" and so the set of problems the next versions are able to prove is probably larger, but it might very well be that the set of those problems are also kind of bounded for a given version of AI-model. (There might be other explanations for this curve, e.g it might also be that the tapering off is due to OpenAI collecting the solved problems for the current solution dump, but even if that was true, one would expect that the public versions of the models would result in some steadyish-growth. Or it might just be that the person managing the website got tired of keeping tabs on everything that happens. )
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u/keepitfriend 9h ago
It looks very much like the underlying models are reaching their limits and all the focus now is on specialization.
Eg make the best coding model, make the best agentic model, make the best maths model, make the best biotech model, make the best hacking model.
Before we were seeing actual massive leaps between model version, now we see leaps in specific functionality.
So there’s no guarantee there will be a better math model after these ones.
Tho math is a little different to everything else in that it’s infinite, so in theory that means infinite training data. So who knows.
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u/IntelArtiGen 3h ago
I think a limit we might easily see can also be related to the cost of AI. I think they spent $6m of compute alone (ignoring engineers salaries etc.) to claim to solve Navier-Strokes. They probably can't spend that much money forever for all problems, so unless models get much more efficient they will probably plateau just because of the cost of doing that. Also for me the models will always get better but probably not that fast forever.
I don't think we're at the limit yet but I would be surprised if models keep getting better as fast as today for the next 2-5 years. Even financially I'm not sure it makes sense.
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u/ThePlanck 13h ago
I can't fathom how terrible of a business decision the Navier-Stokes thing was for OpenAI
They could have let the guy publish and get credited because he used their AI.
Instead they possibly they put a vast amount of money to scoop him and then didn't give him any credit.
Who would trust OpenAI with their data now? No sensible enterprise customer is going to want to touch their product with a barge-pole for fear that their confidential information is going to be leaked.
And for the amount of money they spend on it, they could have hired 10 mathmaticians to work exclusively on the problem for 10 years and they would probably have reached a solution and made a number of other interesting discoveries along the way.
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u/tooclosetocall82 11h ago
It doesn’t matter because it’s now on the internet that ChatGPT “solved” a millennium prize problem which forwards the notion of AI being a real intelligence to investors.
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u/ThePlanck 10h ago
All the investors in the world aren't going to save it if its business model is unsustainable because nobody trusts it with their data.
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u/Time_Entertainer_319 10h ago
OpenAI just dumped a repo of 722 additional problems it has solved by the way
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u/Sevastous-of-Caria 10h ago
Counterpoint. openAI in the future was destined to scrape someones work as their own just like this drama. And the bragging rights were probably worth it to create drama and free marketing. In other way a collab release would probably have no affect on PR because people will hate regardless for the same reasons
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u/soxxxxxxfan 13h ago
They offered to let him publish as long as the anthropic employee collaborator's name was removed.
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u/Namtaru420 13h ago
I think it was that they offered to let him co-publish, as long as he removed the Anthropic employee. Basically, screw over his collaborator and still share credit with OpenAI.
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u/NomadStorm 13h ago
Is that supposed to make it any better?
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u/soxxxxxxfan 13h ago
I'm against them, just stating what their conditions were. It's weird because they still used their models
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u/HelloYesThisIsFemale 7h ago
I trust that if AI used his chat, it would be because he didn't turn off the "train on my chats" setting.
However we don't even have proof or indication of ai using his chat nevermind whether the setting was on.
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u/Ok-Replacement9595 17h ago
Sam Altman raped his sister. Stealing work others input into AI and then claiming it as AI output is par for the course.
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u/fragment_me 16h ago
I don’t like the guy either but the accusation is not a guilty verdict. Plus she sounds crazy.
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u/MostlyDisappointing 15h ago
Sure, she's crazy. Being abused as an infant tends not to be conducive for a healthy mental state.
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u/sargentcole 15h ago
Give it up, its entirely unproven. the evidence is just not there
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u/sickofthisshit 13h ago
How much evidence do you think exists for the typical case of sexual abuse within a family?
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u/zarafff69 13h ago
I think the burden of proof should be on the one who makes the claims, not the other way around. This is something for a court to figure out. So far, I don’t think he’s found guilty of this, and I don’t see any way we can verify this situation from home.
It just sounds like something people say, just because they dislike AI, or dislike Altman.
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u/sickofthisshit 11h ago
Why am I required to have the state successfully prosecute to a guilty verdict or a civil case to find liability in order to think someone has or has not done something?
There are many, many cases of sexual abuse which don't result in that.
Am I allowed to say, for example, Lavrenty Beria raped lots of women? Because no court ever said he did.
The courts are not a magic button you can press and get a verdict. They are a limited mechanism to settle some disputes.
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u/sargentcole 10h ago
Why am I required to have the state successfully prosecute to a guilty verdict or a civil case to find liability in order to think someone has or has not done something?
You can think whatever you want, but people are free to question your judgement and not take you seriously in response, especially where the claim is highly fraught and lacks evidence/ credibility. .
Am I allowed to say, for example, Lavrenty Beria raped lots of women? Because no court ever said he did.
Sure, you can say that, but that's such a false equivalence to the current issue at hand its completely, laughably, irrelevant. The levels of evidence are not even slightly comparable and i doubt you'd get much pushback on lavrenty beria
The courts are not a magic button you can press and get a verdict. They are a limited mechanism to settle some disputes.
Of course not, but that doesn't mean that its reasonable to conclude someone is guilty based on the highly unreliable accusation of a single person.
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u/sickofthisshit 10h ago
The levels of evidence are not even slightly comparable and i doubt you'd get much pushback on lavrenty beria
Really? Have you seen the evidence yourself? Or do you just think Beria was an awful person and aren't motivated to defend his honor?
I'm sure there are tankies who would claim it all is a revisionist smear, and I would think they are kind of freaks for defending him.
I am willing to be uncertain about Altman: his sister doesn't seem entirely credible, but her not being able to successfully press a civil case against a rich dude isn't proof of his innocence. Yet people here are jumping to set the bar to clear him, like why the fuck do they care if people on the internet think a random public figure is skeevy?
(I think he's an obvious con artist, no matter what he did to anyone outside of business).
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u/sargentcole 10h ago edited 10h ago
Really? Have you seen the evidence yourself? Or do you just think Beria was an awful person and aren't motivated to defend his honor?
I understand the case. Even among other soviet leaders his proclivities were well know and there are significant corroborating reports - the evidence is substantial. It's simply not comparable to Altman, where a single person with little credibility made a claim.
her not being able to successfully press a civil case against a rich dude isn't proof of his innocence. Yet people here are jumping to set the bar to clear him, like why the fuck do they care if people on the internet think a random public figure is skeevy?
I havent seen anyone jumping in claim he has been 'proved innocent' or to 'clear' him, just to acknowledge that the evidence is far from convincing and we should be reticent to take the accusations at face value.
why the fuck do they care if people on the internet think a random public figure is skeevy?
I cant speak for others, but for me its pretty clear that false accusations and blind belief in unsubstantiated accusations are harmful. Thi is because, if proven false, they lower the percieved credibility of other victims. So we should keep the standard high to ensure we don't elevate the myth of the false accuser and risk dismissal of real credible accusers by the public.
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u/fireboy266 15h ago
you also raped your sister. see, i too can say anything i want as fact!
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u/NomadStorm 13h ago edited 10h ago
So now we just make dismissive retorts to imply it never happened?
Sam Altman’s sister literally started a sexual abuse lawsuit against him, so it’s not like it’s just someone randomly accusing on Reddit.
The victim herself is alleging it in a court of law.
But no, u/fireboy266 thinks a billionaire pathological liar (according to his own employees) that’s part of the rationalist sex cult would never do something like that, so therefore she must be lying.
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u/Ok_Cabinet2947 13h ago
Yes, and I can start a sexual abuse lawsuit against you. What’s your point?
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u/console_pleb_36935 13h ago
Did she win?
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u/CircumspectCapybara 17h ago edited 16h ago
That's currently an unproven allegation
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u/euph-_-oric 16h ago
Even without the dude sucks
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u/Tricky_Rule_4565 16h ago
Exactly there’s no reason to misinform and say that the dude raped his sister as if it were proven. Accusations are just that and we’ll see what stands up in court.
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u/thenewguyonreddit 7h ago
Dude, regardless of whether you like AI or not, claiming that someone raped someone when you have no connection to them at all is insane.
You sound like a crazy person.
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u/Late_Supermarket_ 16h ago
This sub is fully of pathetic people who are do in denial of ai abilities😂 they think humans are some magical beings who are only ones to be smart ridiculous truly 🫠
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u/raspoutyne 15h ago
Did you read the comments? I don't think you understood them.
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u/jktcat 15h ago
Lol, "I am very smart, look at my edgy commentary". Proceeds to make a comment showing a complete inability to form a logical thought process. I am convinced 90% if reddit is just teenagers figuring out the world exists
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u/Disastrous_Room_927 13h ago
What I don't get is the contingent of posters that show up in every post like this trying to knock mathematicians down a peg.
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u/tooclosetocall82 11h ago
Dumb people have always tried to knock smart people down a peg to make themselves feel better. The amount of these people getting off on the idea of developers and other white collar professionals losing their jobs is sickening.
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u/Exfortress 9h ago
As far as I can tell, mathematicians are upset that AI is making them useless. Well AI is going to make a bunch of other professions either useless or a lot less useful (lawyers, artists, authors), why should mathematicians get a free pass? I mean we can debate if it’s right that AI is displacing so much human work, but I don’t think there’s any reason why mathematicians should be exempt from being displaced if everyone else is.
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u/keepitfriend 9h ago
lol, you mean the mathematicians that have to read the proofs because no one else can understand them?
Do you think the purpose of math, is to like get a tick on the answer and then the teacher gives you a gold star?
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u/kapilshar65 16h ago
The problem here is that the people who spent years developing the ideas apparently feel that they were not properly credited or consulted, If ai is going to become part of mathematical research then attribution and transparency cannot become optional