Yet another Hacker News

74 points theemathas 4 hours ago 41 comments

breezybottom 1 hour ago | parent

So much for the "it's lean verified" defense.

n2d4 55 minutes ago | parent

The withdrawn papers were not lean verified nor claimed to be.

hckrme 48 minutes ago | parent

I wonder why the heck were they provided / uploaded then. Perhaps just a fast and loose play-out on their part. What I don't understand is how come engineers / scientists working on these are okay with this kind of attitude.

amelius 47 minutes ago | parent

I suspect they are not okay with this way of working.

mcmcmc 23 minutes ago | parent

I’m sure the outsized pay packages help quite a bit

ModernMech 15 minutes ago | parent

They’re okay enough to do the work and collect a paycheck and stock options. I don’t think their arms are being twisted that hard.

boxed 10 minutes ago | parent

How come mathematicians are ok with human mathematicians are ok with that kind of sketchy submissions? That's pretty bad too.

xjdirkdn 8 minutes ago | parent

Lies travel around the world before the truth has time to put it’s sneaker’s on…

The headlines keep the hype train arunnin

breezybottom 38 minutes ago | parent

But that's the argument that was used when people here were skeptical about the results.

yreg 34 minutes ago | parent

not these results

nkmnz 30 minutes ago | parent

Can you point to where that defense has been made?

soltanov 1 hour ago | parent

Proof by authority works until human mathematicians actually run the code. Back to prompt engineering.

qoez 49 minutes ago | parent

Without a thriving mathematical community to point out these things it would have stayed broken. With automated math that community as tao pointed out is at risk.

viraptor 42 minutes ago | parent

Have you got a link to someone pointing it out? It looks like they're still going through formal proofs so likely found the problems that way.

sanxiyn 35 minutes ago | parent

Yes: https://x.com/ElliotGlazer/status/2108026240582246600

viraptor 31 minutes ago | parent

So someone ran a different LLM to find an issue they'd find anyway during formalisation? That's not the same as relying on thriving community.

oliculipolicula 10 minutes ago | parent

The bigger question is why there was internal pressure to rush such a historic launch without having someone in the company, anyone, check the proofs first.

This concerns the Hodge conjecture (millennium prize related) paper. Seems to me like PhD nerds weren't confident bosses pushed ahead anyway.

afavour 30 minutes ago | parent

That’s not proof though is it? If the original LLM output is fallible surely the LLM review of that output is also very much fallible?

renyicircle 43 minutes ago | parent

Another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50002650

hmate9 41 minutes ago | parent

3 mistakes (so far) out of ~400 is still a pretty good hit rate

matsemann 39 minutes ago | parent

But can the others even be "disproven", given that they apparently are so messy and awful that no humans can follow them? Shouldn't the onus instead be on OpenAI to prove that they're right, instead of hundreds of mathematicians wading through slop?

true_religion 21 minutes ago | parent

The onus is on formal verification when it comes to computer generated results. So far only 22% of the papers have it.

malux85 37 minutes ago | parent

Exactly, I was glad to see these withdrawals, its a natural part of a healthy ecosystem of scientific review, hypothesis, claim, test, refute, extend, withdraw, its the heart of science.

IMO If you take out all the stupid human aspects mostly related to fear, egos, etc, we should brace the imperfect and helpful tools, whatever they are, improve them so they are as easy as possible to review, and keep that core scientific discovery loop going

afavour 32 minutes ago | parent

I’m conflicted. I guess we’ll see what the final total is once an enormous level of unpaid human effort is expended verifying the AI outputs. A little sad if that’s the future of math.

It kind of reminds me of when tech giants open source a project as a means of putting a positive spin on abandonware. “Here’s the source! Any problems are yours to fix now. You’re welcome”

rubyfan 10 minutes ago | parent

We are all reverse centaurs now.

watinthedeutsch 19 minutes ago | parent

I would say not. For a mathematicians, having to retract more than 2 papers in a lifetime is already a big issue in their career.

jacobstokes 15 minutes ago | parent

But is it equivalent to withdrawing post-publication or is it more akin to not passing peer review with major revisions requested?

zzzeek 15 minutes ago | parent

Most mathematicians don't produce 400 papers in a 48 hour window either so I'm not sure comparisons are helpful

catlifeonmars 15 minutes ago | parent

How many mathematicians need to retract ~1% of their papers?

jansport123 5 minutes ago | parent

well, it might be that these proofs are correct or it might be that people aren't bothering to spend a lot of time checking whether they are correct. OpenAI already has a pretty bad reputation in the mathematics community for how they are approaching this process, they seem to be more interested in creating a story for their IPO than advancing math.

chairhairair 15 minutes ago | parent

This company is just irresponsible. We (at least, Americans that vote and can therefore decide indirectly what’s legal) should not allow them to continue.

trio8453 14 minutes ago | parent

How is withdrawing a paper irresponsible?

moregrist 11 minutes ago | parent

They only withdrew it after someone pointed out that it was a flawed paper.

In one case by asking Astra to review it.

Not exactly encouraging that they did their homework before publishing results.

spider-mario 6 minutes ago | parent

Withdrawing it, in itself, might not be, but it kind of skips over the part where they have a paper that warrants it in the first place.

monideas 4 minutes ago | parent

This type of sentiment is almost always motivated by fear over the potential negative personal economic impact from AI (e.g. losing employment).

Publishing a math paper and then unpublishing it is not "irresponsible". It's just a math paper.

margorczynski 9 minutes ago | parent

If you do a dump like this all of it should be formalized, there's simply too much material to review by hand and additionally it is AI-written which makes it hard to read compared to human work.

TrackerFF 9 minutes ago | parent

And added 6 new ones. Might want to add that to the headline.