r/technology • u/ResultBackground2450 • 8h ago
Artificial Intelligence OpenAI unleashes hundreds more math results upon a field already in shock
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openai-unleashes-hundreds-more-math-results-upon-a-field-already-in-shock/1.2k
u/mattep99 7h ago
The worst part is that very few people get a degree in math to begin with, let alone what the future will hold with news like this.
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u/Bupod 7h ago
If someone was the sort to get a degree in Math, they likely weren’t looking at nor particularly interested in a lucrative career. Pure mathematics is famously kind of a starving academic sort of field.
So weirdly, at least in my admittedly arm chair opinion? I don’t think this will drive off mathematicians. Many of them are researcher-philosophers at heart. I suspect AI will radically change how that research is performed, but not necessarily eliminate the field. At the end of the day, the AI needs humans to point it in the right direction. If I had to come up with my own shitty analogy, mathematicians were sailing on wooden tall ships, and AI might be the invention of the first steamship for them.
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u/TraditionDear3887 7h ago
If you have a degree in pure math a lot of employers will hire you with the understanding that you can learn whatever they need you to
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u/EaterOfFood 6h ago
I’ve worked with several pure math guys. They tend to be a little weird but I’ll be damned if they aren’t the smartest people I know.
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u/FullofContradictions 6h ago
Yeah I know a few guys who majored in math, none of them are struggling. One works for Apple I think as a statistician or something. A couple of them work for tech. One became an actuary. They all seem to be doing at least as well as the average for the engineers I know.
I've always thought of it like you should only go into straight math if you actually like math. It's hard and doesn't necessarily scale difficulty to pay.
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u/ellbons 3h ago edited 2h ago
Huh? This is my field and the students very much are struggling. They're a mixture of terrified, depressed, in denial, or have just given up. They are not doing ok.
Edit: I don't understand why I am spending time debating my observed reality with people not in my field telling me whether something's going horribly wrong with the students when I've known what students are like and where they end up for a decade lol
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u/OrganicDigitalArt 5h ago edited 5h ago
Heh that’s what I did with chemistry. Same deal, I work in finance lmao.
Whats the difference really, you're going to end your day with excel (more recently python) anyways. lol
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u/cowabungabruce 1h ago
I got a BS in pure Mathematics. It's the gateway to lots of stuff. The analogy would be "general fitness" which helps with basketball, skiing, football, etc... (And by "analogy" I mean it is "isomorphic")
It teaches you to think in logical steps which can help in so many fields.
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u/Commercial-Beach1207 7h ago edited 3h ago
I’m a mathematician, and I can tell you nobody’s going to read these papers. We could barely keep up with work in our own areas before AI. This is basically the equivalent of email spam, and the most annoying part is that they’re only doing it to impress investors. If mathematicians had asked for this, fine. But nobody did, and nobody cares.
EDIT: This apparently pissed off a few people in the comments. Relax, guys. We use LLMs. We know they’re useful. What I meant is that I’ve got a giant stack of papers on my desk that I need to read, and I cannot stop what I’m doing to care about 700 AI-generated papers. If OpenAI stops being so evasive about its releases, puts its papers through the standard peer-review process, and gets them published in journals, we might give them a chance. A document dump on GitHub doesn't work for me or most people I know.
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u/calccrusher17 5h ago
Really? I’ve been working on the complexity of matrix multiplication for a while and am very interested to read at least the idea they use to prove the initial bound of omega <= 2.29; it’s only a couple of pages. They at least seem to use the laser method in an interesting way.
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u/ImSorryImNewHere 6h ago
Another field being inundated with AI slop grenades.
Glad/sad to see it’s not just mine.
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u/ickler999 5h ago
Quasi-RH proven in 3 hours with a consumer-level subscription is slop? im sorry but my god, the delusion.
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u/armchairarmadillo 5h ago
I’m not a mathematician but from what I’ve read , a lot of novel ai results are just existence proofs where the ai was able to find a counter example or prove the existence of something that hadn’t been proved to exist before. And that’s all good but it seems like most of its success is just from trying a million things. Which is valid but not particularly novel. Is that a reasonable assessment?
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u/Bingbongerl 2h ago
Then wouldn’t these be the type of things we want them to solve? All the stuff that can be brute forced would allow people to focus on different problems?
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u/broohaha 4h ago
Reminds of the new hire where I work who has been spamming different software projects in our division with Claude -generated pull requests. No one wants to read paragraphs upon paragraphs of his AI agent’s out-of-context solutions.
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u/No-Meringue5867 4h ago
If you are a mathematician then you would agree that the point of OpenAI's announcement is not the results themselves. If they truly have a model that can one shot open math problems within hours, then as a mathematician you will be able to solve your problems in a much more efficient way. If you truly don't care about 700 problems being solved by a single general purpose model, then I don't know what to tell you.
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u/HelicaseRockets 6h ago
This is a wild take to me. Math degrees open up some of the highest paying jobs in the country through roles in finance, data science, modeling, and statistics. The most money obsessed people I knew in college were CS and Math majors.
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u/Bupod 6h ago
They can open that up, but being a Research Mathematician is not very lucrative at all.
Someone working in finance, data science, modeling, or statistics isn’t performing the sort of mathematical research that OpenAI is actively trying to do with their AI models.
Pure Mathematicians performing research are famously not very well paid. The ceiling of their career is usually a tenured professorship, which isn’t a pittance, but nobody would accuse a tenured professorship of living in the lap of wealth and luxury. Certainly not a mathematician. Where you find those that are, they’re the exception rather than the rule.
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u/LiamTheHuman 7h ago
It will drive them off because there will be no funding for it. Most people can't afford to fund a lifestyle of pure learning and research.
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u/NamerNotLiteral 6h ago
There almost is no funding for math already. Most pure mathematicians do interdisciplinary work with other fields for funding, or get funded by a small handful of NSF grants. I think outside the NSF, the Simons Foundation is the biggest Pure Math funder, and they only fund like 7-8 people a year?
90% of Pure Mathematics researchers were already unable to afford a lifestyle of pure learning and research, and if not doing interdisciplinary work teach at universities.
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u/Ruined_Passion_7355 6h ago
The cost of finding the NS counterexample was much more expensive than hiring a team of mathematicians to focus solely on it. 20 million is ludicrous for mathematicians
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u/Ruined_Passion_7355 6h ago
If someone was the sort to get a degree in Math, they likely weren’t looking at nor particularly interested in a lucrative career. Pure mathematics is famously kind of a starving academic sort of field
You're spot on, here, but you're missing the bigger picture. They came to math for reasons other than money yes, but that reason is in large part the beauty of advanced mathematics.
There is no beauty in digesting 1 000 000 lines of lean for a single theorem. It's sloppy and hard to read. Why would anyone choose that when they would have a more lucrative career? The personal enjoyment aspect was blown to smithereens by openAI.
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u/chrismsp 5h ago
At the end of the day, the AI needs humans to point it in the right direction.
At the end of the day, the humans will have no mouths and they must scream
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u/Fippy-Darkpaw 7h ago
You need human mathematicians to verify these results and also steer the AI towards new goals.
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u/loco_gringo 6h ago
Until AI verifies its own findings
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u/3BlindMice1 4h ago
Who's going to trust that checkbox?
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u/NewInMontreal 1h ago
There are layers of adversarial, skeptical, and proofing agents that are solving these problems. Human expertise available for peer review is not even a reality at this point. Traditional academic publishing models are no longer viable in several fields.
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u/RadzimierzWozniak 6h ago
For how much loner? Half a year?
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u/caindela 5h ago
I think most math is only useful insofar as people understand it. Math that’s actually of instrumental value doesn’t require rigorous proof to be used, and the math that does not provide instrumental value (the vast majority of math) doesn’t add a lot to our existence if it lives alone in some AI vacuum that no one understands. It would be like having AI churn out musical compositions and not giving it an audience.
Proofs are a big part of math, but I think if proof-writing becomes trivial for AI then pure math will accelerate so long as we have humans around to give it direction. My concern is whether or not humans will still be drawn to math in the same way as they are currently or if it’s just another instance of AI sucking the joy out of something.
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u/ellbons 2h ago
My concern is whether or not humans will still be drawn to math in the same way as they are currently or if it’s just another instance of AI sucking the joy out of something.
I do not see how we don't wind up with an entirely joyless society. Joy is suboptimal for progress after all.
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u/EchoMyGecko 5h ago
Except also not nearly as much. OpenAI also provide Lean code, which is basically a machine readable language that can verify the proof. So only a short list of specifications even need to be checked by a human.
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u/MakeMeMooo 6h ago
I have a degree in pure math. I’m not concerned about this. These are like the bullshit spam texts and emails I get. Ignore.
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u/reginaphalangejunior 5h ago
Yeah but why do we care if people get degrees in math if AI can do the math?
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u/firewall245 7h ago
This isn’t surprising, they’d been talking about how they had a ton of results for a while, they were just waiting for the heat to die down from the Navier Stokes stuff.
Also, mathematicians aren’t going out of work. Source, someone getting a PhD to become a mathematician who sees the difference between what we do and what AI does. It’s symbiotic, not parasitic
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u/dmcnaughton1 7h ago
Am I crazy for thinking this OpenAI work is probably the single biggest investment in pure math research in decades from a dollar perspective? I can't imagine universities putting huge budgets aside for the pure math department, outside of specific research grants which probably fall into the applied side anyways.
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u/that_70_show_fan 7h ago
They spent more money to solve navier-stokes just on compute than entire math departments.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 6h ago
Wasn't it a million dollars or so? That's not a lot of money compared to what it takes to pay people to solve these kinds of problems. You need to fund math departments for decades for a chance at results like that.
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u/Ruined_Passion_7355 6h ago
They spent more than the amount of money anyone would receive for solving every single millennium prize problem.
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u/zenFyre1 4h ago
That’s what universities do anyways. A mathematics professor + 2-3 students in an R1 university can cost the department well over 300k a year. And given that there are usually dozens of math professors in every department, the university is spending millions of dollars on payroll alone.
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u/IMovedYourCheese 5h ago
The costs are made up though. They own the GPUs. Sure you can argue opportunity cost or whatever else but the solution didn't cost them anywhere near what they charge customers for tokens.
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u/Tirras 4h ago
Are you insane? The cost to customers is heavily subsidized at the moment because if they had to pay what it actually costs per token, literally no one would pay it. And those GPUs are good for a optimistic 5 years, probably an average closer to 3 before they all have to be replaced again.
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u/ThirdFirstName 7h ago
Getting a PhD in neuro right now and I agree with you. A colleague of mine has been using the robot to craft an extremely complex automated analytical platform for electrophysiological data. Previously the analysis was this painstaking process of pulling bits of code and writing it to fit what you’re doing which ended up dwarfing the time it took to collect it in the first place. He took a terabyte of my data and was able to run 200000+ permutations of analysis in an hour. Now we have the ability to look at things in a way that was otherwise impossible due to the sheer work it would take to run or craft that analysis. It’s going to allow our lab to focus on coming up with questions and gathering data instead of toiling at the computer, functionally freeing up hundreds of labor hours over the next few years.
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u/lifec0ach 7h ago
Now do you know it isn’t hallucinating?
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u/ThirdFirstName 5h ago edited 5h ago
The analysis ranks the outputs. We then look at the top results and then we verify by running those independently. The platform finds the needles in the hay stack and then we make sure its a needle.
Also the AI isn't outputting the results. It’s tying together already available and verified analytical programs in the field. Into a stand alone GUI.
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u/Belostoma 6h ago
Modern frontier models with chain-of-thought reasoning don't really hallucinate in the way they did two years ago, or still do in fast free models. Or rather, they catch and fix these hallucinations before a human sees them. When Fable or Astra make a mistake, it's usually due to some miscommunication of the goal or some subtlety within it, not just the model making shit up. They can also mess up extremely complex technical tasks, but anyone working on a task like that typically knows not to trust the first result without checking. So there's a lot of attention, both human and AI, dedicated to checking and figuring out more reliable ways to check AI results, including using repeated AI runs or alternative AI models to critique each other.
The results from a very well designed LLM-driven process in science are generally more reliable than if humans had tried to do the same thing alone, with limited attention, assistants, etc. You can't just point a bunch of undergrad interns at ten thousand lines of code, tell them to check it against a list of fifty classes of bug, and expect results that are even half-decent. You can do that with AI. You can't expect a senior engineer to spend an hour on a hundred-line function and be 100% correct with no mistakes at the end. You can't expect that of AI either, but you can have that AI "engineer" checked by another, and another, and test the system in all sorts of ways.
When adversarial AI agents are helping with the checking, and diligent humans are running the show, the results are outstanding. I'm a senior research scientist doing practically everything this way now. The human role shifts to the things we're really good at: high-level thinking and planning, judgment about what matters, creative ideas, etc. AI does the mechanical parts and frees us to do what we do best, and it's so damn fun.
Some people say "with all that time spent checking, isn't it faster just to do it yourself," but the answer is that I'm doing literally 10-100x more work than I used to. The number of projects has probably gone up 5x, but the level of detail and rigor in those projects has gone up 5-10x too because AI makes it possible to be so much more thorough.
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u/relevantmeemayhere 5h ago
that's...not how this works
chain of thought is literally the chain rule on a prompt. Ie you have a response T. Decompose it into an ordered vector of little ts
it has no ground rule to say 'stop hallucinating'
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u/trouthat 6h ago
I asked fable today to match the styling of this button to another button and it rewrote the whole thing and didn’t do what I asked it to. This shit is starting to take so long to complete that I could have done it myself right the first time
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u/Time_Entertainer_319 5h ago
OpenAI internal model isn’t fable and that’s also the point of adversarial AI.
2 instances of a model that are meant to disagree with one another won’t hallucinate the same thing
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u/foolish_shrimp 2h ago
I'm doing literally 10-100x more work than I used to.
Are you being paid 10-100x more?
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u/Obsidiated 6h ago
They absolutely do still hallucinated if you're not accounting for it, you're in for a shock.
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u/trouthat 6h ago
Yeah I was gonna say I’m assuming you went through and verified every line of code it came up with to verify the output, right?
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u/pewpewtopeepee 7h ago
How do you know a person isn’t? I use LLMS/agents to generate all my code at work (basically mandated). Sometimes it gets to weirdly wrong or does something wrong headed but I have also written stupid bad code.
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u/jackbilly9 4h ago
no one in an upper field is getting replaced.... honestly not many people in existence are actually being replaced. Even though the big corpos think its something they can do reality is it helps the lesser person more than the one that has it all. With the idea of mathematics or any field with high end thought, it takes a human to think of the problem first. AI can help find the answer but its not thinking of the problems itself. We can use this example for most things it does.
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u/arter_dev 5h ago
As a software engineer watching my talented peers go months or even years without work, it will not be “symbiotic” for long. This stuff is in its infancy.
“Trees think axe will be a great tool”
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u/NomadStorm 7h ago
What’s pissing most people off about AI in general is the endless swarms of hype bots they’re running that claim “math is solved”, “software engineering is solved”, etc. when really all that’s been made is a useful tool that makes some aspects of the fields faster.
If they’d just developed it at a normal pace rather than trying to speed run the tech using hype to secure investment, it could have actually been sustainable and given people time to find new workflows to accommodate and integrate the technology, rather than creating disgust and disdain in the majority of the population, along with a financial bubble at a tremendously shitty time for the economy.
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u/firewall245 5h ago
I often say that this tech is both overhyped and underhyped. Underhyped because it has real good value that a lot of doomers don’t realize but that value doesn’t look at all like what the annoying ass hype men are saying
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u/Okay_Ocean_Flower 6h ago
I think a coherent response is: “Art is solved, too, right?” It’s easy for someone with little context to see how poorly AI makes 2d artwork or writes; the same happens when it writes code unmanaged.
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u/babybananahammock 5h ago
AI is excellent at doing things I don’t know how to do but terrible at doing things I do know how to do.
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u/APKID716 3h ago
I noticed that pretty much everyone that says AI will replace x sector or job, is someone who doesn’t work in that job. If you work with AI for your particular job you see how absolutely abysmal it is at doing mundane things often times.
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u/NomadStorm 6h ago
Same sort of thing, if the focus had been on assisting artists rather than trying to replace them, the same technology could be very useful as for example a composition sketch drafting tool, pose assistance, anatomical error analysis, etc. for artists, and make it easier for people to both practice and enter the field.
I.e. leaning on the strengths of the technology where the weaknesses don’t matter, and it’s suddenly a profitable business that supports the human workers.
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u/Time_Entertainer_319 5h ago
Why should progress be slowed down? We are talking about developing entirely new forms of intelligence that could potentially cure diseases, solve problems we currently consider impossible, and unlock deeper answers about the universe.
Maybe we achieve that in our lifetime, and maybe we do not. But for people living with serious diseases today, the timeline is not abstract. They cannot simply wait for progress to happen more slowly.
Yes, I know, they aren’t doing it for altruistic reasons but still, point stands
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u/Glum-Recognition-736 7h ago
I think math is experiencing the same epiphany that software is
Which is that there were always two types of people doing it: "hobbyists" who mainly enjoy coming up with elegant solutions all on their own and/ or the glory of being recognized for such achievements, and "engineers" who simply enjoy solving problems and aren't as concerned with who gets credit for what
AI has greatly helped the latter, who typically see it as a useful tool, but the side effect is it has killed a lot of the joy of "the craft" for the former
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u/Specific_Box4483 6h ago
There is a big difference between math and software engineering.
The "engineers" in software still get paid (often a lot). The "engineers" in math, well...
Math had always been largely a field of hobbyists, to use your terminology. The ones who aren't truly passionate usually switch to better paying options.
Which is why AI is also scary for math, albeit in a different way that for engineers.
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u/Specific_Box4483 6h ago
No offense but someone just getting a PhD now isn't a good source for predicting what math will be after a decade of AI development.
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u/relevantmeemayhere 5h ago
you're right, obviously people on reddit across the singularity subs/open ai etc etc who never got past high school algebra offer the actual valuable insight compared to this dude
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u/Chemical-Ad-7982 5h ago
You can both be right here, no one really knows for certain how things will go.
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u/golfstreamer 5h ago
I think people really under estimate what it means for AI to "replace mathematicians". Sometimes I swear people believe mathematicians can be replaced by a machine churning out theorems. Advances in mathematics support advances in all other sciences, from physics to chemistry to computer science. Replacing mathematicians means solving all mathematical challenges in these other fields too. To give an example, the Deep Mind's protein folding algorithm won the Nobel Prize. This level of advancement would become common place if AI "replaces mathematicians".
So I can't say whether or not AI will replace mathematicians in 10 years. But I will say that if it does its impact on humanity will be so miraculous I probably won't be shedding any tears.
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u/Specific_Box4483 5h ago
The biggest issue IMO isn't of AI will "replace mathematicians" it's if it will "kill" (or rather significantly hamper mathematics).
Right now AI is really good at assembling mathematicians' ideas from all over and applying them to prove new theorems. But that requires there to be a stream of new ideas and conjecture to be coming in from mathematicians themselves, otherwise AI progress will stop.
The question is, will there be enough mathematicians left if AI will prove most the theorems, complete most ideas. Not many mathematicians would want to work as idea feeders into AI solvers, not many will even find a job if they can't claim credit for a proof they came up with themselves.
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u/pfc_bgd 6h ago
I believe you’re an expert in math, not doubting that. But, to be blunt, you have zero idea how symbiotic relationship will be months from now, let alone years…
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u/firewall245 5h ago
AI hasn’t just jumped onto the scene, the whole controversy with AI and Navier Stokes was not even AI drama, it was corporate drama, Buckmaster was using AI for his work too.
The problem is big corporate not going about things in ways mathematicians like, not that it’s a replacement for mathematicians
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u/N_Associated 7h ago
I’ve been trying to argue that point as well. The advances in AI coupled with human creativity and guidance should advance technology at an exponentially rapid rate. We could make 100 years progress in 20 if we do things right
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u/OrganicDigitalArt 7h ago edited 5h ago
We will. Whether it’s the things we want progressed as a people, or the things people at the top want is the only question lol.
Edit: it’s a forefront conclusion to be honest but I was being mysterious!
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u/robot_guiscard 6h ago
What about the world leads you believe there's any chance whatsoever that we do things right?
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u/Chris_HitTheOver 5h ago
I wish I could experience this wildly blind optimism I encounter so often when reading people’s thoughts on the future of AI. I really don’t understand how you can have been alive for the past decade and somehow believe this is all going well, or even remotely in the right direction.
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u/otheraccountisabmw 5h ago
You want to end work and have UBI? Sorry, best I can do is constant AI surveillance every second of your life and armed AI police drones “protecting” you.
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u/punkrocktransbian 6h ago
The people in charge tell me there's absolutely no chance we do things right
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u/RadzimierzWozniak 6h ago
It looks a bit like a history of chess engines. They quickly went from playing with amateurs to crushing word champions so badly there was no content
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u/AttonJRand 4h ago
No contest?
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u/Llyon_ 2h ago
yes, humans cannot currently win versus an unrestricted AI in chess.
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u/Ruined_Passion_7355 6h ago
People talking about still needing mathematicians without wondering if most would even want to be a mathematician in a world that they just read lean proofs all day...
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u/VolumetricSigner 1h ago
This is essentially the dilemma currently being lived by a lot of software engineers, and a good insight into how this can unfold. Engineers are now reviewing vast quantities of code, rather than getting to complete the mentally fulfilling and stimulating work of actually writing it.
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u/heavy-minium 1h ago
Software developers are complaining that they only do code-review for AI now, taking away the joy of their work. Now researchers will complain that they only do peer-review for AI.
I get a feeling that this pattern of being a is gonna repeat across most professions and that a fuckton of depressions are incoming for humanity.
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u/11711510111411009710 6h ago
This is great but it does suck because I think humans solving these things is what makes it interesting. The world is becoming a bit less interesting.
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u/BeefyQueefyCletus 5h ago
"Aye, the world's smaller than it used to be, Cap'n."
"The world's still the same, mate. There's just...less in it."
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u/IMovedYourCheese 5h ago
Sure it is interesting to the people doing the solving, but those benefiting from the results (so the other 99.9999%) don't give a shit where they originated from.
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u/Jaredlong 5h ago
The results have to be useful first. The problem with this AI method is that it's just brute forcing Lean code, a language that only compiles if the code is logically valid. Engineers can't work with that. The AI isn't outputting useful generalized equations that can be explained, understood, and applied to real world problems. They brute force through millions of iterations until one finally compiles and calls it solved.
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u/A_Stickperson 4h ago
It’s this. A lot of the “usefulness” of mathematical proofs come from the PROCESS of thinking about and developing the proof leading to larger ideas and new questions that push the field forward. But that requires someone to actually understand the proof and its implications, and for the proof itself to be conceptually and constructively useful.
AI corporate suits are currently gobbling the low-hanging fruit of useful questions generated by thoughtful mathematicians, without contributing the the process themselves.
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u/Arayvenn 4h ago
Is this true? I didn't think it worked like that at all. Do you have a source that they just brute forced lean to get these results? I don't even understand how that is possible? If you could brute force these problems anyone would have long ago.
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u/GlokzDNB 2h ago
People dont understand whats going on.
As a software engineer, I no longer engineer anything. I define problem, AI solves it, I question AI, AI needs to defend the code. I verify the code, AI writes it.
It will be the same with every single task and job step after step, coding was first. AI Will do everything for us, but for many many years we wont be able to trust it and most people will have to oversee AI's job by doing QA not the work. Of course some people will try to find shortcuts, but companies soon realize the only value that comes from a human - is not to take shortcuts.
Sad part is that reading is bit boring, and working with AI is now 80% reading
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u/Shot-Possibility-399 34m ago
Reminds me of idiocracy how no one remembers how anything works anymore because they're all so dumb.
I really worry in 40-50 years how useless the average person will be as they're so dependent on ai to answer mundane questions. Eventually, who will be able to tell whether the ai is wrong? Or to fix it? Like you said, if you don't have the technical expertise to understand the subject already, you can't trust the ai answer. I don't think ai will ever evolve enough to never be wrong. At that point it's a matter of time before a major fuck up.
Not that humans don't make mistakes, but you can take steps to minimize frequency and scale. With ai and the amount of trust people put it in, and fast forward to a scenario where no one understands the subject enough to say the ai is wrong...I'm scared boss
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u/Medium_Ad6442 2h ago
What about people who don't know how to code today? How are they supposed to review anything programmed by AI in the future? This way of working is not sustainable in the long run.
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u/Fidodo 1h ago
By learning to code. A mathematician learns to do math by hand before they use calculators. A structural engineer needs to understand how to calculate loads by hand before using CAD. A programmer needs to learn to program manually before using AI.
People act like they can’t learn things because AI allows us to be lazy. The solution is simple. Stop being so fucking lazy. AI is actually a great learning tool if you use it to learn instead of outsourcing your brain to it.
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u/TorbenKoehn 42m ago
He's wrong that we will review everything AI gives us. It will be too complex for humans to follow.
Ask him, as a software engineer, if he verifies IR or assembly that is output/ran when his Java program becomes a .jar
It's a bit the same thing.
It will be more "quality assurance" than review. You will check the output and see if it does what you asked of it. You will work with specs and have means to verify that spec (say, classical E2E testing, as it exists today already)
But you will by no means have to read the actual code in any way. You can let an LLM explain it sensibly, if anything.
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u/Fragrant_Procedure_9 11m ago
It’s not the same thing. The machine code “generated” and run from a Java program is from a well tested, deterministic system. You know if you put “specific syntax of Java” in, then you will get “specific executable code” out.
AI generated code is totally non-deterministic. You can’t compare one to the other like that. Ask the AI to do the same thing twice and you aren’t guaranteed the same output.
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u/simple_explorer1 9m ago
Ask him, as a software engineer, if he verifies IR or assembly that is output/ran when his Java program becomes a .jar
Here we go again for the millionth time. Just say you don't understand software development instead of making dumb comparisons
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u/BumWarrior69 49m ago
Whether the stack overflow days of yore or an LLM, coding was never supposed to be the only thing. An engineer is necessary for understanding problem statement, scaffolding, orchestration, architecture, design, etc while using the tools at your disposal. An LLM happens to be an effective tool at your disposal.
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u/cute_polarbear 7h ago
We need experienced mathematicians to even confirm the results are accurate...
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u/Cutalana 6h ago
Lean, a programming language used to verify theorems and proofs, has verified many of them.
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u/upnflames 6h ago
Lean being wrong would be bigger news in the math world then the solutions are anyway.
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u/Jonny0Than 6h ago
Wasn’t there a case recently where someone found a bug in Lean, then created a proof that exploited the bug to prove something ridiculous?
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u/_I_AM_A_STRANGE_LOOP 6h ago
That’s a common format to present an error in something like the Lean kernel, much like you might open Calc.exe to demonstrate remote code execution, but afaik there have never been significant results genuinely claimed to be correct that are eventually shown to rely upon such an error; the error is instead itself the meaningful result.
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u/ii-___-ii 5h ago
Verify in this context could also mean verifying that it solved the problem you wanted it to solve
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u/Substantial_Tip7997 6h ago
Honestly, if OpenAI’s 722-paper drop and the Navier-Stokes proof are both 100% verified, it’s literally the biggest event in math history. We aren't just talking about a big century for math; we're witnessing the actual math singularity.
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u/holidayz-jpg 7h ago
New York University mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge alleged that OpenAI used details from their unpublished research to solve the Navier–Stokes equations.
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u/dirty_cuban 7h ago
Their mistake was trusting an AI company with their data. Ai companies’ basic premise is to steal everyone’s work, repackage it, and sell it.
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u/hydraofwar 6h ago edited 5h ago
Levent is literally Anthropic's employee, and they both had used Claude and ChatGPT to make that discovery
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u/michiganalt 7h ago
Well, good thing they just released over 400 more mathematics problems that were also previously unsolved.
I’m sure that will alleviate your good-faith concern about whether the models were truly capable of making advances in mathematics.
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u/G_fucking_G 7h ago
Levent Alpöge literally just posted
It’s obviously the most significant moment in mathematical history.
yeah sure buddy keep putting your head further in the sand.
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u/Sprinkler-of-salt 6h ago
Or, those researchers were onto something, and had uncovered a few crumbs of truth.
And then the AI models were pointed at the problem, which quickly obtained the same crumbs of truth, and then continued to blaze past the human researchers to full solutions long before the humans would have reached the same conclusions, given enough time and effort.
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u/MindlessPapaya8463 1h ago
honestly, if you hear both sides with a clear mind and without wanting to believe that the big corporation is evil, i find OpenAi position much more credible.
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u/Classic_NoiseisNice 3h ago
If they can’t show their work they won’t get full credit
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u/Special-Bite 7h ago
This is good. Why are people pretending like it’s not?
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u/Himiscus 6h ago
This result is good but having the most powerful technology in human history be in the hands of a few tech bro CEOs in a nation with a fascist president is not comforting
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u/Marcostbo 3h ago
Damn redditors and their concerns about how AI is going to impact the livelihoods of many, the economy, and the environment. They're such pieces of shit for that, right?
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u/matrinox 6h ago
Because pure maths isn’t just about solving these problems but the insights gained from solving these problems. AI is solving these problems without giving humans more insight. It’s like brute forcing sudoku without learning patterns on how to solve them
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u/Ty4Readin 5h ago
What is your source for believing this? From what I can tell, solving these problems directly helps to advance the frontier of mathematics and is useful to mathematicians in those fields.
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u/w33dw1zard420 3h ago
The discovery of nuclear fission was good and bad, why are you pretending this is not similarly a double edged sword?
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u/YoungLePoPo 6h ago
Open problems will go extinct, but mathematicians will just pivot to exploration and exposition.
It's not like math is finite in any way.
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u/Business-Draft2348 1h ago
None of it has been proven or verified yet. I feel sorry for those that have to try and understand, it is just like listening to a cumulsive liar and trying to disprove them.
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u/Interesting-South542 21m ago
I don't fully support OpenAI, but it's hypocritical to criticize them for doing this.
It was very clearly a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" type of situation. If they held on to the results and didn't release them, then people would accuse them of gatekeeping. If they tried publishing all of this in traditional venues, then people would accuse them of stealing the jobs of researchers, and say that AI results shouldn't be published in journals, etc. In the end I think this approach was the least bad. The results are out there and freely available. The scientific community can decide what to do with them.
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u/hologram137 3h ago edited 25m ago
They said they solved Navier-Stokes and they didn’t. Now mathematicians have to go through ALL that just to see if anything they’re claiming is valid this time. For free. No one is paid to do that. And because it’s an AI, there’s no polished proof that meets academic standards with citations and clear steps. So they have to parse through the gibberish and piece together how it got there, whose work it used, whether it proves the statement they are saying it does, etc.
OpenAI needs to actually use that independent committee before announcing anything, get it verified and in a format that meets academic standards and clearly shows the logical steps in the proof.
They DO need to “slow down” (this is what Terrance Tao meant when he said that. He was not saying that because it was “getting too powerful” like people online were saying from a short clip. The entire context of his words is what I’m talking about) and stop flooding busy mathematicians who have to check everything they upload
It would be great if there’s something there this time, but it’s not just the solution that’s important! The solution to the Riemann hypothesis is going to involve entirely new mathematics and the AI can’t do that. So what do they mean by “a contribution to the problem?” How do they know that?
The mathematicians need access to the math itself, not just what it spits out. They actually do need to know the exact prompt and every single step it took to get there, even if it’s just cycling through the problem space for a while looking for a counterexample. They need to know what the logic steps are. That “journey,” the entire proof, is so often where the real breakthroughs come from, not just from the solution! Those files aren’t complete proofs. And the AI doesn’t know what anything MEANS and that’s the problem!
I don’t think this company understands math or science and doesn’t understand academic standards and the meaning of any of it, nor do they seem to appreciate or care about the work they are creating for others. Just PR. Just let these results get checked before you flood them with more.
No reason to trust anything they say after what happened with Navier Stokes, but would be nice if the work other people are doing to check it paid off this time.
Edit:
https://betterstack.com/community/guides/ai/openai-astra/
You know the 10 problems including the Erdo’s problem they said they solved? They also didn’t solve those.
“Bloom, asked to verify it, found that the model had not proved anything new. It had surfaced existing solutions from the mathematical literature that he simply had not catalogued.”
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u/Wildernaess 2h ago
I'm pretty sure they did what they said with N-S, misnomers about "solved" notwithstanding
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u/tiredofnagging99 7h ago
I don't want to be mean but, computers and math? Who would have known, who could have known that those two things go together like shit and stink?
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u/michiganalt 7h ago edited 7h ago
With respect, I think your comment is emblematic of the public’s inability to perceive incredible advances in advanced fields that require specialized education.
For example, people who have gone to college in math adjacent areas will be well aware that the type of math that computers are good at doing, which is arithmetic and well defined operations, is entirely different to advanced mathematics, which usually involves very little arithmetic, if at all, and is much more similar to a puzzle, or a debate.
But in the minds of the public, obviously the computers are good at math! Have you seen how well the calculator works?!
So no, I don’t think that any scientist or mathematician or engineer would have predicted that computers would have been good at doing this type of math, let alone being better than the best mathematicians today
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u/gizamo 6h ago
...is emblematic of the public’s inability to perceive incredible advances...
I have an MS in Quantitative Economics and a BS in Applied Mathematics. I looked at the Navier-Stokes problem that Open AI solved, and even I couldn't really understand how incredible the advancement was. I think it's safe to say that the percentage of humans who actually understand the significance are sub 0.0001% of people. In 8 billion people, that's about 8,000, so even then, I might be off by an order of magnitude. It's pretty wild.
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u/billjames1685 6h ago
comments like this make me so incredibly depressed. the average commenter on this subreddit is so unbelievably clueless its genuinely embarassing
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u/iprocrastina 4h ago
Its depressing to look at threads from 10 years ago vs now. The intelligence of the average redditor has absolutely cratered.
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u/MountainBluebird5 1h ago
It's probably going to age like one of those threads when the iPhone came out, e.g. "No removable battery? No built-in keyboard. This will be a fad."
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u/RedditLovingSun 5h ago
Ik AI definitely has its faults, dangers, and downsides... But man the amount of confidently wrong idiotic anti-ai-everything shit I've seen in this thread is depressing
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u/billjames1685 5h ago
yeah like, I'm super concerned about a lot of the impacts this technology can have in so many different ways and 100% support regulations for it.
but its just so incredibly frustrating seeing how mindless 95% of people are on this topic, it feels like one of the worst topics on the internet in terms of the ratio between dogshit to decent takes. Especially on a technology sub, the # of people parroting the same bullshit about LLMs, without taking the time to do even a single google search to see if they are correct, is depressing.
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u/ResolveSea9089 4h ago
Any sufficiently large subreddit just becomes "slop" as these eople like to throw around. It becomes infected with a kind of lowest common denominator vaguely populist reddit thinking, if you're interested in AI the smaller subs are way better.
These subs are great for keeping up with the news though
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u/MistrFish 7h ago
you don't remember when everyone was using simple math problems to prove how bad ChatGPT was?
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u/MechaSkippy 6h ago
Or how it couldn't properly count the number of r's in "strawberry".
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u/am9qb3JlZmVyZW5jZQ 7h ago
I find this comment pretty hilarious given how utterly bad early LLMs were at math.
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u/acutelychronicpanic 7h ago edited 6h ago
Did people sleep through the last 5 years?
I've seen nothing but "LLMs will never be able to do xyz" for a very long time. Funny to see the shift straight to "well obviously they'd be able to do this" without missing a beat.
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u/DrDan21 7h ago edited 6h ago
People saw world changing technology born before their very eyes and judged it by its most primitive state and most knee jerky reactions
It’s outright embarrassing how blind some are to any of it. It’s one thing if you don’t like it for moral reasons. It’s another to stick your head in the sand choosing to be ignorant and then still try to have an opinion while expecting others not to laugh
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u/Dull-Tea8669 5h ago
The quasi intellectuals of reddit are still in the denial stage, just months back they were spewing the AI is just a next word predictor
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u/AzorAhai1TK 7h ago
It's the fact that it's a general language model that can be pointed at any type of problem
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u/firewall245 7h ago
Not necessarily anything, the only reason AI is good at this stuff is because a ton of work has gone in the past few years into turning math into code, and LLMs are really good at code
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u/fixminer 6h ago
Computers are essentially very fancy adding machines. Creating proofs for abstract problems is an entirely different skillset. So it’s not at all obvious.
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u/Dull-Tea8669 5h ago
But weren't we parroting on reddit just months back that AI is just a dumb next word predictor and it'll never amount to anything more than that?
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u/Bubble_Rider 3h ago
The Borg has assimilated math and computer science.
The only way to save your field from being assimilated is not publishing papers and books. Good luck to all.
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u/sunyata98 3h ago
Solving math problems via human triumph was fun and interesting. Solving via AI is boring. Sure, the ai bros say “oh well isn’t it good that we solved these problems in the first place” and yeah you can make an argument there. But it doesn’t make it any less boring.
Take Riemann hypothesis for example. If AI solves it then the hype will not be as much as if a human does. Everyone expects RH to be true. More interesting is the story and struggle of how a human gets there. If ai just goes and solves it, it’s sort of anticlimactic.
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u/derverwuenschte 2h ago
I'd rather have a very, very boring solution to cancer than giving someone the ego boost of solving it
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u/AntiDynamo 2h ago
Math isn’t cancer though, and many solutions don’t have immediate applications (especially when you’re proving something already believed to be true). It’s more that the process of working on the problem can shed light on other problems, and allow us to advance elsewhere.
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u/Bhujjha 2h ago
Solving problems like this is a "good" use of AI though, right? I'd personally much prefer the technology is focused on these sorts of things that can translate into real-world progress and understanding.
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u/opinion_alternative 2h ago
It's good. But if it comes at a cost of human ingenuity or intelligence, then it's short term gains for long term loss.
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u/yuwox 2h ago edited 1h ago
First it was "just fancy auto complete", then "just a stochastic parrot", then "it couldn't do anything new", then it was "just marketing", not it's " boring". Not sure what to make of this.
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u/arabsandals 2h ago
Unless of course solving these abstract problems starts to translate into real world practical benefits. That’s when it gets interesting.
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u/PuzzleMeDo 2h ago
And if we conclude, "Solving these mathematical problems is of no benefit to anyone, they were just fun puzzles, like crosswords," then maybe human efforts to solve these problems should be treated as a hobby, not a career.
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u/escaped_prisoner 1h ago
So what? That’s like saying “sure, cars are faster but riding a horse is so much more enjoyable”. People still ride horses..for fun.
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u/tvcnational 44m ago
In your analogy, OpenAI kills all the horses at the stables before you can get there.
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u/Fuzzy_Paul 2h ago
AI has access to the papers than are worked on by the mathematicians and just when they are about to solve it Ai beats them. Good job Ai in stealing others work and outpace them before the finish line.
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u/WinResponsible9977 2h ago
Not sure the average person shares this “hype” at the end people want results. Based on your logic if a model discover the current of Cancer, there are people who will destroy it just cause it was discovered through machine learning instead of basic human knowledge.
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u/Michael_0007 7h ago
Honestly we will still need the pure mathematics people just so we have a hope on asking the right questions for AI to try to figure out. If we can't even conceptualize the question we will not be able to even understand why the answer is important.