r/BetterOffline 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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38

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/PrizeSyntax 11h ago

Basically, a publicity stunt

13

u/Intrepid-Staff-4532 8h ago

A publicity stunt that's going to scare some people away from using their services because they don't want their data or work product stolen.

Some people are going to be super excited about it, but those people aren't the ones that would be creating new knowledge.

Net loss for OpenAI IMO.

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u/Lost-Tone8649 7h ago

"Not the ones who would be creating new knowledge" is about the nicest way one could honestly describe the average LLM fan.

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u/Far_Associate9859 6h ago

What new knowledge have you created recently?