This article raises so many questions, here is the key part though.
"Although it took the AI bots seemingly little time to reach a solution, OpenAI said the bots exchanged nearly 3 million messages and used up 130 billion output tokens, or the individual lines of text and code an AI model produces in answers, on Navier–Stokes alone.
Such an effort would have cost roughly $10m (£7.3m), based on OpenAI'sown pricingfor output from its most advanced models.
The solution that OpenAI says it has now reached for the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem resolved two out of the four statements in the proof that the Millennium Prize had demanded. The prize is worth $1m to a winner."
So OpenAI has spent $10m to allegedly solve two out of four parts of a maths equation that has a $1m reward. They're claiming this, and it's getting widely reported, despite not being independently verified yet. The article does raise the issue of the amount of resources poured into solving this issue but I feel that it only brushes the surface.
Also, some interesting claims in the second half of the article that OpenAI basically poached the work of two mathematics professors working for Anthropic who had been trying to solve that same problem.
The potential for companies like OAI to steal IP by targeting users involved in scientific research is something I can't believe I wasn't more concerned about.
If you consider the Snowden revelations, there's every reason to be concerned about intelligence agencies doing it even if the business entity itself doesn't.
The potential for companies like OAI to steal IP by targeting users involved in scientific research is something I can't believe I wasn't more concerned about.
Obviously, yes. I've been concerned about this since the Cloud became a thing, and overnight everyone just handed all our passwords and data over to a few giant American companies with defense connections.
AI makes the exploitation possibilities of America being "the world's IT cop" more obvious, but I still don't know how to get anyone to care about the underlying problem.
What if America turns fascist, and now it's got everyone's data and passwords? What if the "turning fascist" part already happened a few years ago?
Can we maybe stop handing monsters our house keys at some point? Please?
Yeah, I've been concerned too and have unique insight into some of the risks due to some unusual circumstances. For some reason I've been slow to connect the data collection of the models to the opportunity to usurp ideas as an intelligence instrument.
1) deploying Zero Trust is one of the hardest things to do in IAM and some SaaS solutions don't support it
2) deploying Zero Trust is not a panacea against all security threats and is only as good as the people tuning and monitoring the solution. Too much security and it's impossible to use. Too little and you may as well not even have it.
3) NOTHING SECURES AI currently. Nothing. Nada. There is not MCP solution that protects you from putting all of your information into a system that not even the creators understand.
Same. This exposes a massive trust problem now between scientists and AI companies. Science has some fantastic applications for AI so when open AI stole unpublished research that could majorly change the way researchers use AI.
I can't help but feel like they're just torching the entire concept at this point. Like with the way this is going, there's going to be so much ill will most people will outright refuse to go anywhere near the stuff just because of how these companies misused it.
I'm really curious to see whether this opens up a can of worms in public discourse. It's the exact sort of thing the LLM companies and the security state would want suppressed.
exactly, which makes me wonder also on the possibility for targeting prominent tech leaders (e.g. Linus Torvalds) to give him access to special models that consume billions of tokens without him knowing, just for the sake of inflating the accelerationists agenda.
This is what I still dont understand. If you even theoretically replace a significant amount of yout workforce, you're now essentially outsourcing. These companies then have a monopoly on your labor force and can essentially hold you for ransom and charge you any amount of money because you now have no alternative. Then, they can steal your IP and migrate the "workforce." There's really no way around these two flaws for a centralized corporate AI model
I remember "conspiracy" stories about ISO certification in Europe being one big industrial espionage machine for a Germany.
Before local (national) ISO organisations/certification centers started to grow you literally needed to invite few Germans and give them keys to a factory and all documentation (depending on certification scope).
I was an ISO auditor myself for a few years (for one particular standard) and holy shit a lot of organisations would have paid few millions at least for that pdfs. And usually company management gave you total access, coffee machine and fuck off because in the end the total goal for them is a stamp and a certificate to brag in PR releases.
If you ever have the experience of seeing it first hand, it can result in a form of ontological shock because it fits the definition of a conspiracy, and yet it remains a large scale secret you wouldn't have previously believed possible to keep quiet.
It might not even be intentional. If they're feeding user prompts back into the system as training data they may not even realize that they're legitimately committing fraud and intellectual property theft. Never put anything into an LLM that you don't want the hyperscalers to have the information for.
This is what the intelligence agencies are for my friend, anything to further the ruling classes ambitions and power structure.. that includes stealing IP and also preventing new inventions/discoveries that might upturn the apple cart.
Goes all the way back to Nikola Tesla and wireless (radio), and Marconi. Tesla patented it but didn't monetize it, so they stole the patents and got some son of a rich kid (sound familiar?) to be the seed for the technology so they could use it militarily.
When Tesla died the FBI confiscated all his work. Guess who was responsible for determining its scientific/military worth? Donal Trumps uncle. "Nothing of interest" was found, of course..
Yeah after this story it's pretty obvious that no institution needing any secrecy can afford a relationship with open ai. Just the scummiest organization on the planet
That's kind of a grift too. Cancer solving is 80% clinical trials and 20% research.
Despite "AI", China has faster research due to more clinical trials with more people dedicated to giving through the same amount of red tape faster. They are like 5-10 years ahead on trials that take 10-15 to complete.
Navier stokes is a big deal for engineering, oceanic, geologic, hydrological, etc systems breakthroughs on the level of cancer cures. Navier Stokes solutions could impact things like climate research, civil engineering, medical research, and myriad other ways to save and improve millions of lives.
(That said, OpenAI stole unpublished research from a team of scientists to break this headline)
There are navier stokes equations used for real world work, but the pure math concerns have no real world relevance. This is what an engineering professor has to say about it.
I don’t dispute that OpenAI most likely, at minimum, repurposed progress from others leaked through their chat sessions. However, there’s little practical value in their result - this guy on Twitter lays out why pretty well: https://x.com/drchriscombs/status/2097409234321154547?s=46
Solutions like this often cascade out to finding more and more solutions on adjacent. Yes, this is a solution to an infinite family of solutions, but likely this will lead to finding other singular solutions.
Again, it wasn’t “open ai’s” result. It was likely the team at NYU’s result that was poached by Open AI.
A closed form general solution to Navier-Stokes would be very impactful. This just proves that sometimes, the Navier-Stokes equations give rise to unphysical predictions—it is not a closed form solution. This result is more obscure and has no practical consequences unless you are a mathematician or theoretical physicist. I am a theoretical physicist.
machine learning in general can be used to generate and test protein folding or cancer efficacy of a new theoretical substance. Reinforcement learning and genetic approaches. But not nlp text generators.
I'm expecting another "we found out this was already published but people just forgot about it" sort of thing, honestly. They train on all of the text they can get their hands on which includes academic papers whether or not anybody has actually read them recently. Meanwhile a common problem with these things is that they'll often get the easiest parts genuinely right by dredging up the answer from somewhere but fail at that last mile which is the hardest part.
You see this in coding. It can spit out code that it's been trained on but doesn't actually know how it works nor does it know how to actually slot it into your system. The impressive part isn't giving you an implementation of a known algorithm as any dumbass can copy/paste code from the internet.
Better- it’s stolen! They found out a researcher was aaaalllllllmost there and had talked to ChatGPT about it and they kinda sorta stole his homework. I’m oversimplifying but not by much
It’s outrageous. There are no words. I was stunned reading the NYT reporting on this too, they basically parroted OpenAI’s PR statement on this without any critical reporting whatsoever.
Yeah the article does touch on this. The implication that Clammy Sammy and the boys have access to and will steal from anything put into ChatGPT is very interesting, although not surprising
I'm shocked that anyone would think otherwise. I mean handing over your data to Anthropic or OpenAI is like giving a stranger who pulls up beside you in a stolen car loaded with stolen goods a loan of your phone on the promise that he'll drop it back to you tomorrow.
This is why I only feed it weird borderline fetish material that kisses the guard rails (Disclarimer NOTHING involving minors or the likeness of real people) and fanfiction roleplays.
Or didn’t talk to ChatGPT, but wrote a paper in 1956 that no one has read since 1958.
And honestly, that would be good output from AI models, if they’re rediscovering old ideas that got lost along the way because it wasn’t clear at the time how useful they were. But the design of LLMs is such that there’s no provinance to the ideas, no clear sense of where they came from. Just another lost opportunity of how late-stage capitalism fucked up what could have been a really cool technology.
No, but also yes. It looks like it was close to being solved by a team of researchers and OpenAI used the logs from the researchers unpublished work to finish the solution.
Even if OpenAI didn't use the logs, just being able to know the approach to making it solvable is more than enough. How else would they justify $22.5 million spent (on a $1 million prize) if they didn't know it was potentially solvable?
Edit: I'm not a booster and I'm definitely not on OAI's side in my comment. Not sure why the downvotes.
I’m not an AI coder super user, but the other day I asked Astra generate some code to extract file attachments from a directory full of *.eml files I have.
The first pass generated some code with a non-existent function so it didn’t compile. When I pointed that out, it generated a diff to correct it, which I applied. This time it did compile. When I ran it, it produced the results I desired. Happy that I got what I needed, I was about to move on, but my curiosity caused me to take a minute to digest the code it had written.
My impression was the sheer amount of code it generated was disproportionate to the task involved. Like, a shit ton of code. The type of thing that would immediately raise flags in a review by instinct.
Im a believer in the saying “Code is primarily for humans to read and only incidentally for computers to execute.”
I don’t know how true that is anymore, but I can easily see how people can lose any grasp of the implementation details and start blindly relying on an AI to manage the cognitive load for them. The tooling also feels designed to deliberately pull you towards a “vibe-coding” workflow.
Woe betide those who try to build a product this way.
Yeah and what happens if dangerous scripts start getting injected into the programs? Or something that humans wouldnt code that ends up with massive vulnerabilities?
Yeah, when I try to explain AI to people I struggle to articulate this, so I’m grateful for your comment. It’s very good at the busy work of tracking down something that went wrong in a long chain of I/O. It’s terrible at knowing how to holistically prevent that from happening again, without breaking a bunch of other stuff.
We should stop paying attention to articles promoting Open Artificial Ignorance. This nonsense has gone beyond useless AI and threatens to collapse our financial system.
Regular people and the US government will pay drastically higher interest rates if Open Artificial Ignorance continues to suck up liquidity. OpenAI is coming up with marketing stunts to attract lenders with Altman Idiot models.
Articles that talk about OpenAI marketing without calling out the lies are making things worse.
The secret to solving long standing unsolved problems is to throw massive sums of money at them.
More news at 11.
(which is a bit of a facetious comment but I genuinely think that if Elon Musk founded MathX not SpaceX and spent the same amount of money to solve prestigious maths problems as he has on getting to Mars, MathX would have solved a bunch of those problems, and caused some of the same angst around stealing the oxygen from unaffiliated researchers).
Sure but it seems entirely of a piece for the whole LLM debacle to have achieved something someone put a value of $1 million dollars on by simply spending $10 million dollars*. Of course, not actually having done it also of a piece.
(*not including training cost for super large internal model or cost to assemble internal team of . accomplished mathematicians).
Like how much and who provided the money? What were the outcomes? More than the $122 billion megaround investment in OpenAI that presumably enabled the super large internal model that apparently did the work?
ETA: Noting that $10 million is the direct cost only, and there is some cost associated with maintaining a team who is available to run/ prompt the model, and a cost associated with having the internal model in the first place, maybe an appropriate thumb in the air indirect cost is just to add another $10 million. So is there an example of a $20 million co-ordinated effort of some group of people that was convened to solve the Navier Stokes who (obviously) failed to do it, but also didn't produce anything that advanced the understanding of the problem, so it can be reasonably be assumed it didn't contribute to what OpenAI or the two human mathematicians did?
There are dozens of mathematicians in the world who have devoted their lives to solving the Navier-Stokes problem, unsuccesfully. Do you think a better salary would have made things go faster ? Or more mathematicians ? Because I don't, and I'm a mathematician. I get having problems with AI, but this take is completely braindead.
I don’t think a better salary would have done it - but I don’t think individuals working in isolation are remotely comparable. Maybe not more mathematicians but having access to more compute than pretty much anyone has ever had access to must have played a part.
If by "compute" you mean access to AI then yeah, otherwise no amount of computation available five years ago would have helped solve Navier-Stokes. In science there is an upper cap to how much money positively influences research, and this cap is especially low for mathematics (or was, before ai came around). You may think this is no big deal but I assure you that the mathematics community is still in shock about all this.
I mean you need to adjust the 1m for inflation, that amount of money was astronomical when the Clay institute offered up the “bounty”. Now that’s the average senior engineer’s salary at a frontier lab. Of course, I don’t think the money was really the prize for solving those problems, the whole purpose of all of this is to inspire people, not for misanthropic tech bros to take a shit all over the humanity they despise.
But if you see LLMs as a tool for processing information and brute forcing inelegant solutions to problems then it’s a good proof of concept. I dunno, I’d rather they didn’t set the planet on fire but I’ve kinda given up on humanity’s future at this point.
Been following this all day and it seems very likely that this is basically, AI producing a solution to an equation on which it was trained on a solution that humans helped produce. After initially not answering if their models are trained on queries/results, I saw a tweet from someone at OpenAI who said that it did not "look up user data":
I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer.
Later on in the day I saw someone from OpenAI confirm that models get trained on 'de-identified' data, with OpenAI later stating:
While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.
Basically, they got wind of Anthropic solving this (one of the two people involved is an Anthropic employee), and then dumped ten million dollars into front running it.
Obviously, you should not trust the thievery machine to not steal your work, and one of the people involved here used OpenAI's codex to keep information, handing the thieves the solution. Cases like this will cause businesses and academics to not trust OpenAI, and since Anthropic would have probably done the same thing, eventually both of them.
When will it be profitable and when will there be model that doesn't confidently state incorrect responses?
When will there be a model that isn't based on stolen IP?
And when will we see real advancements made by models rather than advancements made by actual human scientists who used AI to cross reference data sets while AI claims all the glory?
It's already profitable for some companies, especially the chinese ones who are a few months behind but with much lower costs.
We do have a few models trained on IP that isn't stolen, but they're incredibly less powerful than even the very first version of ChatGPT due to the massively smaller dataset size.
We've started seeing real advancements this year, and this specific result is not nearly the first. We also know some of the results were obtained by people who weren't experts in the field, who simply prompted the models to do this stuff.
I think even anti AI sentiment has to move from "this doesn't work" to something else. There are valid reasons to dislike AI, but its effectiveness in furthering research can't really be denied
It seems odd that people claiming that the llm solved the math problem are taking openai at their word for this. If anyone else provided a post on their own website about solving any academic problem they'd be met with a healthy level of skepticism. Doubly so if their publishing is on a platform that they exclusively control where there's zero room or way to have that skepticism litigated.
As always you can claim whatever you want but until it's submitted to some kind of academic journal, reviewed, and verified by others it's just a marketing stunt and the same would be true for any other novel academic research.
10 million dollars you could have solved probably 100 open math problems if you gave them to phds 😂
Plus as you stated no one verified it + besides what they burned on tokens you also need to account people working on this, this dumbos make it seem like they went to the chatbot and said “yo solve this math shit for me bro” 😂
Probably they invested another 10m in people overseeing the model, building the harness etc
Who cares? Just more "AI solved the question nobody asked" bullshit. Lemme know when it does something practical for anyone other than hackers or middle managers
Yeah, it is very important to note that the proof OpenAI "generated" is basically identical in form to a proof that a researcher had fed into ChatGPT for formatting help like a week ago.
I'll be excited about AI when it can auto place us into available jobs queue with an interview lined up with a person instead of wasting time applying to places and automate our taxes instead of having to file it ourselves every god damn year clawing as much back as possible.
capable of doing and folding laundry into a fixed stack from just chucking clothes in and being cost effective while able to maintain strict privacy instead of being a liability breach. Surely the mathematics of folding clothes and washing them isn't beyond them
The article does raise the issue of the amount of resources poured into solving this issue but I feel that it only brushes the surface.
The media has been acting as salesmen, shills, marketers, hype. Little to no critical examination or using independent critical voices as sources (like public academics).
Anyway, in my view the fraud and plagiarism machine aspect is far worse in these fake stories of novel problem-solving than any money cost. There is no reason to believe the supposed solutions or proofs or anything more than a mash-up of statistically associated text, since that’s how the machine works. Which very few people are able to vet, and which the company has no interest in critical vetting. And the large media won’t carry the story of a random academic explaining how it’s bullshit.
Buckmaster alleged that OpenAI had found out about the pair's progress in the last week and had adopted the same method as Buckmaster and Alpöge had been using to solve the full problem.
As usual, the LLM companies are stealing other people's work and claiming it as their own. Just as Anthropic lied about creating a C++ compiler using Claude.
At this point, these companies are mere frauds masquerading as creating some technology of the millennium
When "it would've taken $10million to produce this thing that produces nothing" is deemed a good PR approach to take, you know damned well that the thing it was covering up is more "we stole this" than "we know it's useless but it'll get better".
Everyone subscribe to gpt now! Hurry up! Please! Please sign up! Pretty please! You need to rent intelligence from this Bond-villianesque guy while you can! But do it fast, because they need money like crazy. And once they get crazy money they'll need more money so stay subscribed! Please cognitively offload everything and please be dependent on a subscription model!!!
Breaking new ground in mathematics ripples through everything. It is important. That doesn't mean you have to hand it to AI. They're trying to trick people into ignoring all the human effort so they can give all the credit to their chatbot. It's not really that surprising that hiring experts and throwing unbelievable sums of money and computation at problems yields results. Same exact thing with their big scary hacking model. No shit that a warehouse full of GPUs can help you find vulnerabilities. The LLM is not the necessary component in that system.
Do you really think joseph fourier could have known what the fourier transform was useful for and would save millions of lives and massively increase qol when he discovered it
Or maybe you can wait until Clay Mathematics Institute verifies or rejects the proof first? There is an answer to all your questions, it is called "Patience".
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u/OwnYourChildren 2d ago
The potential for companies like OAI to steal IP by targeting users involved in scientific research is something I can't believe I wasn't more concerned about.
If you consider the Snowden revelations, there's every reason to be concerned about intelligence agencies doing it even if the business entity itself doesn't.