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MyFirstSassyesterday at 12:21 AM9 repliesview on HN

Based on Tao’s description of how the proof came about - a human is taking results backwards and forwards between two separate AI tools and using an AI tool to fill in gaps the human found?

I don’t think it can really be said to have occurred autonomously then?

Looks more like a 50/50 partnership with a super expert human one the one side which makes this way more vague in my opinion - and in line with my own AI tests, ie. they are pretty stupid even OPUS 4.5 or whatever unless you're already an expert and is doing boilerplate.

EDIT: I can see the title has been fixed now from solved to "more or less solved" which is still think is a big stretch.


Replies

D-Machineyesterday at 12:29 AM

You're understanding correctly, this is back and forth between Aristotle and ChatGPT and a (very smart) user.

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jasonfarnonyesterday at 12:42 AM

I had the impression Tao/community weren't even finding the gaps, since they mentioned using an automatic proof verifier. And that the main back and forth involved re-reading Erdos' paper to find out the right problem Erdos intended. So more like 90/10 LLM/human. Maybe I misread it.

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dpacmittalyesterday at 5:43 AM

There's a lot more detail in this reddit post from the author - https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1q6yw5g/how_we_used...

Tenobrusyesterday at 2:46 AM

strongly think you should go read the thread to get a sense of the level of expertise and amount of effort put in by the humans involved: https://www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread/728#post-2852

mmphosisyesterday at 2:42 AM

This website was made by Thomas Bloom, a mathematician who likes to think about the problems Erdős posed. Technical assistance with setting up the code for the website was provided by ChatGPT -from the FAQ

Davidzhengyesterday at 12:37 AM

Do you need to be a super expert to find gaps in proofs? Debatable

naaskingyesterday at 2:38 PM

> EDIT: I can see the title has been fixed now from solved to "more or less solved" which is still think is a big stretch.

"solved more or less autonomously by AI" were Tao's exact words, so I think we can trust his judgment about how much work he or the AI did, and how this indicates a meaningful increase in capabilities.

Yeaskyesterday at 12:32 AM

Is a good economic decision to hype a bit the importance of the LLM$.