Yet another Hacker News

OpenAI might have stolen another major proof

74 points tamnd 1 hour ago 12 comments

Legend2440 1 hour ago | parent

This is a really weak claim. The evidence they offer is just "someone somewhere says they had a discussion with AI about the topic at some point".

They don't even claim to have had a proof, only to have been working on it.

rnijveld 1 hour ago | parent

I would say there is a significant difference between AI discovering this completely on its own versus AI creating the finishing connecting part by connecting relevant data. Maybe this claim is too strong, but if part of it is true then the claims that OpenAI have made would be too strong as well.

To me it would feel more like how LLMs seem to work for me personally: incapable of unique work, but very capable of capturing large amounts of data and connecting the dots.

drivebyhooting 1 hour ago | parent

If we put aside the idea of credit for a moment, it sounds like human/AI collaboration is indeed super charging discovery.

1337h4xx 1 hour ago | parent

TL/DR: Mathematician opted out of training on 29-JUN and asked OpenAI whether they trained on his data and was told that it "did not happen" but it clearly did.

Grimblewald 53 minutes ago | parent

people seem to miss tge point of this. The problem isn't about credit, its about portraying these models as more competant than they really are. It fuels idiotic statements like jensen huangs recent "agi achieved" statement, which fuels an already dangerous financial fire.

ramblerman 31 minutes ago | parent

As per the post, this mathematician has been working on this problem for 20 years. So either he was "just" about to breakthrough and this is a big coincidence, or Astra was able to push through the remaining block of 5-10-20-never years it might have taken.

That's still a pretty big marker of competence in my eyes.

The point of controversy seems to be who gets credit

jeltz 5 minutes ago | parent

To me that is not a credit thing because this removes a piece evidence for the ability of AI to come up with novel ideas while still making it a useful tool.

mentalgear 5 minutes ago | parent

The big LLM providers, desperate for good PR before their IPOs, are all actively looking for 'almost finished' hard problems, e.g. where the conceptual / creative parts are almost done and they only need to throw their VC-backed resources at to brute-force through the remaining computationally expensive problem (lean, etc) and claim 'they have solved it'.

It's an utterly disrespectful, exploitive process, but all in line with exploitative predator capitalism of the stock market and big companies, now exploiting the knowledge / academia domain for scraps with a thin veneer of 'for science' PR.

galkk 51 minutes ago | parent

I want bunch of lawsuits, because the way things are described now produces perverse initiatives like try to discuss every possible idea that comes to mind with llm and if any of it works later claim the llm stole it.

I would like to see chat logs etc and understand how much of a progress was done by human.

viccis 14 minutes ago | parent

Some mathematicians I know who've been following this have realized that they'd all gotten some emails from people they now know to be affiliated with OpenAI/Anthropic asking questions about their research in a way that seemed like scooping attempts.

Also, a lot of my mathematicians buddies have reported students basically asking if it's worth ever doing grad school for pure math, and even very motivated students are looking for other options now. It's not because they aren't passionate about it, it's that they don't want to work for another half decade or more just to have to start their careers all over.

All of this so that OpenAI and Anthropic can get into math result dick measuring to gas up their IPOs. Sickening.

mdspan 5 minutes ago | parent

Curious, what other options are prospective pure math grad students considering?

dash2 7 minutes ago | parent

Can we get a link to the mathstodon post?