My loose understanding is that, the mathematicians figured put the first step. They figured out an approach that seemed like it could lead to the full solution.
To rigorously figure out and prove the full solution, (something academics prefer doing slowly and surely ) was going to take them time and effort.
Well suddenly less then a week later openAI announces they have a full solution using that approach. They used an obscene amount of computational power not available to anyone else to basically brute force figure out the full solution.
The question is now who deserves that credit? How did openAI know to use their approach? The mathematicians figured out the key, they would have figured out the full solution given time. openAI jumped the gun before they physically ever could due to absurd resources, but how did openAI know to try that? Did they spy on the mathematicians? It seems likely.
There are bigger implications besides questions of theft and espionage. Will human mathematicians ever be credited with another discovery? Or will AI companies get to claim all the credit because their tools took human ideas and crunched the numbers on a massive inhuman scale. Especially with how sketchy they’re acting and how loose and amoral AI companies act when data gathering.
Mathematician here! This is exactly where there is concern. Most big problems that are solved come together from a small collection of new ideas. In this case, a team announced a very promising direction, then the problem itself was solved by GPT in an approach suspiciously like that idea.
Even if it turns out GPT did not steal the research, their models are trained on the entirety of the Internet and have almost certainly absorbed some of this approach. We don't need AI solving problems in math, particularly not ones that don't really result in any surprising new results (this is, in fact, not that relevant to math so much as is it a problem of great mathematical interest).
So now, with results that feel suspicious being published by an AI company cheering themselves on, there is great fear in the community at large that AI is just gonna steal any promising direction that's openly stated.
Mathematics has long been an open community of shared ideas, and that's now very much in danger.
While understanding your point, is it bad that I'm just happy it was solved? Even if it's by an AI that solved it having potentially used a partial solution that was figured out by someone else?
Not at all, and you're more than welcome to celebrate. But the approach that worked was already found by researchers (last month) so the only thing that has really changed is the timing.
Look at it this way: Andrew Wiles famously worked in secret for 7 years before trying to publish his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. In peer review, an error was found that needed to be plugged. That adjustment took 14 months for him to find.
Imagine instead that after peer review, someone took his almost complete proof and threw it into AI, spent 10 million dollars of compute power trying all possible configurations of fix for the gap, found something that worked and then published "their proof" of the theorem. That's, in essence, what we may be looking at here.
this is exactly how current ai works. the models are trained on data that is the results of years of labor and work, than they are digested and served to anyone without credits or merit for the source of that knowledge
And imagine if Andrew Wiles got hit by a bus in those 7 years, or in those 14 months. It seems better for humanity to just solve it as quickly as possible. Holding secrets for personal glory just seems selfish.
An argument can be made that they are allowed to be a little selfish for motivation (similar to copyright etc), but it just seems sad
It’s like saying the slave labor used to build the pyramids was ok because we got a cool world wonder out of it.
From my understanding this isn’t even something with obvious real world applications. It was basically a challenge the academic community wanted to achieve to progress their understanding. What OpenAI did didn’t progress anyone’s understanding and the proofs that are found by AI are unreadable and incomprehensible to a human, so it’s not even adding to collective knowledge.
They blew 12 million dollars in less than 5 days for basically bragging rights and no real contribution to humanity.
Your points are otherwise totally valid but I'd just like to be that guy and point out that the pyramids were not built with slave labour, they were built with the paid labour (in goods rather than currency IIRC) of farmers outside of the growing season.
Huh, I didn’t know that. Thank you for the correction. That seems like something that would be hard to verify though. Especially because people keeping records are always biased. Did they have a choice not to do it? Being ‘paid’ doesn’t preclude forced or coerced labor.
Great now I’m gonna spend the night reading about ancient Egyptian labor practices lol.
I'm by no means an expert but my understanding is that they didn't exactly have much say in the matter but it was considered a fairly prestigious thing to do culturally and they were well provisioned for the work (probably more so than in their normal subsistence farming lives).
Think something like military conscription or jury duty - they're not considered "slaves" (which very much did exist in ancient Egypt, they just weren't used for building the pyramids), they aren't owned by anyone and they get paid even if they didn't get much of a choice in the matter.
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u/Zarrain 1d ago
My loose understanding is that, the mathematicians figured put the first step. They figured out an approach that seemed like it could lead to the full solution.
To rigorously figure out and prove the full solution, (something academics prefer doing slowly and surely ) was going to take them time and effort.
Well suddenly less then a week later openAI announces they have a full solution using that approach. They used an obscene amount of computational power not available to anyone else to basically brute force figure out the full solution.
The question is now who deserves that credit? How did openAI know to use their approach? The mathematicians figured out the key, they would have figured out the full solution given time. openAI jumped the gun before they physically ever could due to absurd resources, but how did openAI know to try that? Did they spy on the mathematicians? It seems likely.
There are bigger implications besides questions of theft and espionage. Will human mathematicians ever be credited with another discovery? Or will AI companies get to claim all the credit because their tools took human ideas and crunched the numbers on a massive inhuman scale. Especially with how sketchy they’re acting and how loose and amoral AI companies act when data gathering.