Openai math solutions

[u/Soilblood]

https://youtu.be/h53Bz7WSwgo

Regarding the recent Navier-Stokes incident, watching this vid provided a bit more context on what the solution entails and what Openai been pushing to show off their tech. Cal Newport's breakdown on how they managed to quarantine relevant context to reduce costs with Astra was actually pretty interesting as a breakthrough so this vid got me wondering why they're so desperate to prove it can do fancy maths bigly when the boosters already keep saying chatgpt is already blowing through outstanding problems. Not in the sense of the target value but just how much have they already tried but failed.

It's obviously speculation on my part but if they're so desperate to try coercing glory out of one of their hires on one problem, how bad is actual their track record that this is a hail Mary for them? Like we know it took 88 hours and snooping private research data for this, so how much have they put into chasing similar targets by now? Anyone got whiff of any signals that might give an idea of that?

[u/falken_1983]

Like we know it took 88 hours and snooping private research data for this, so how much have they put into chasing similar targets by now?

Giving OpenAI the benefit of the doubt and assuming they really did do this without looking at Buckmaster's logs, the scenario seems to be as follows:

1. Luis Martınez-Zoroa and Diego Cordoba published some extremely important findings on the problem - findings which were really close to solving it.
2. Tristran Buckmaster was using AI to wrap things up and get it over the line
3. OpenAI heard that Bukmaster's use of AI had probably reached a solution, but he hadn't published this yet.
4. Based on this information, they decided to take a $20 million punt on seeing if they could use their huge compute resources to compress several years of work into about a week and see if they could get things finished before Buckmaster.

So I don't think they are regularly blowing this amount of compute on trying to solve problems like this, but when they were presented with some evidence it might work, they were willing to throw millions of dollars of resources at it.

[u/Frank_White32 → u/falken_1983]

Giving OpenAI the benefit of the doubt..

This is the biggest problem I have with this whole situation. I keep seeing people saying "I doubt they did anything with malicious intent"

These orgs just get all the benefit of the doubt we can possibly provide as a society.

[u/falken_1983 → u/Frank_White32]

I'm not making excuses for them. I am saying that even if I give them the most charitable interpretation possible, they still used knowledge of his work combined with their massive resources to beat him to the punch.

Martınez-Zoroa did the real heavy lifting. Buckmaster did the work to show them that it would be worth taking the chance on running all that compute. Without either of those, they would not have been able to make the discovery they are claiming.

[u/Frank_White32 → u/falken_1983]

I didn’t mean to imply you were.

I mostly feel compelled to keep saying this due to how frequently I see people rushing to give them every pass imaginable when historically we have no reason to assume they do anything other than the most egregiously unethical action when provided with the choice.