alt Hacker NewsI feel like this kind of "result dump" just cheapens mathematics. How about having a little respect for those whose work this builds on, and current mathematicians some of who may have spent years working on these problems.
Rather than sitting on these results until they had enough for a "shock and awe" 10-result dump, how about releasing these results individually as they were made/verified, as well as the failures (equally valuable to assess the current capabilities of LLMs), and try to make some analysis of HOW these breakthrough results were made. What were the prompts for each of these, how much guidance was there from the mathematicians employed by OpenAI, and most importantly how did the model arrive at these results ... what lines of reasoning resulted it in exploring ideas that humans had previously not explored?
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It is so incredibly liberating to see the intellectual elite struggling with was already reality for 99% of the rest of us: your understanding is not required, it might in fact be detrimental as it amounts to a handbrake on progress.
Understanding never was the goal, results were. We will be getting boatloads of those. What does your understanding get us? You get a fancy house out of it and you might be intellectually stimulated by it, sure, but I hope you can see how that does not constitute a valid need for the rest of society to labor just to support your class and its lifestyle.
That is the point: Make "X can be done by AI" common discourse and watch industries "being disrupted". At least with open weights we'd be able to verify the claims.
Not that I disagree, but I think this is how many people feel about AI output in fields they care about.
It's also a funny historical mirror to an earlier phase of math proof culture: in a previous era, cryptic result dumps were quite common.
You can actually do all of that meta analysis if you have the conversation that led to the solution. This is as easy as just having people release logs of their conversations, and then you can load it into another LLM as context to ask a bunch of questions about it.
I hope this will be normal practice eventually. “Show your work” is trivial if you use AI to solve a problem.
I know it’s tough, but I am not a fan of elitism. Mathematics is no different from all other branches which themselves are just intellectual labor which is again just a special type of labor. There is nothing magical about it and if computers can trivialize it, so be it.
Where were all the mathematicians and academics in general when “regular joe” was automated? Now it’s hitting close to home and their foreheads are starting to get sweaty. I’d say let them. Tough luck. Make mathematics as “cheap” as possible. Nobody owes them any favors.
Let’s commoditize “being smart” and let go of arbitrary divisions between us.