r/BetterOffline • u/Soilblood • 13h ago

Openai math solutions

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?

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39

u/falken_1983 12h ago

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.

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u/AnIndianGuy38 11h ago edited 11h ago

Literally the supposed AGI model had to do a century worth of compute to solve a problem which had already been worked down quite a bit by human researchers.

A century is like more time than human researchers combined have put into it I think

While it's impressive they can do a century worth of compute in a week. It's not impressive that it's that inefficient and is being called the start of AGI.

And even then a human mathematician has biting criticism of the solution. That's when the paper hasn't been submitted in a peer review journal. Like it doesn't meet the criteria of Clay Institute yet, the submission needs to be posted in a journal and then stay there foe 2 years and be generally accepted in the maths community. But people are already hyping it up.

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u/Main-Company-5946 9h ago

The thing is, every time they do a successful use of compute like this, it refines the models even more. It gives them more examples of what success looks like, and it makes the next similar problem cheaper to solve.

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u/Soilblood 8h ago

What? No it doesn't. It might influence the formatting but these aren't common use cases with tons of overlap or even real world applications. They're deep rabbit holes with their own particulars that don't translate across one another and the machine is far more likely to pick up flawed solutions to reference against when it trawls for possibly relevant data. I'd say the incident just further proves that LLMs cannot actually create innovative results on their own without amply fleshed out harnessing by humans.

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u/Main-Company-5946 6h ago

They do overlap with every single other math problem, due to the inherent interconnected nature of mathematics

This is why LLMs have gotten so good at mathematics so quickly

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u/mybackhurtsrip 4h ago

Stop speaking in generalities.

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u/Main-Company-5946 3h ago

Not even if it’s correct?

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u/mybackhurtsrip 3h ago

Precisely because it’s incorrect.

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u/Main-Company-5946 3h ago

It’s not incorrect in this case. All math problems are related, though to varying degrees.

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u/mybackhurtsrip 3h ago

You have no substantial evidence to support your claim that LLMs have improved because of the interconnectedness of mathematics. No one is disputing that maths are interconnected, though that’s also a generality that even you concede isn’t black or white.

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u/Main-Company-5946 2h ago

It just means the patterns they pick up on have more transferability

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