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sensanatytoday at 11:52 AM1 replyview on HN

If you take OpenAI at face value, they claim they threw a relatively simple prompt at the problem on a whim and boom presto, a swarm of "agents", 15 million dollars and 90 hours later they disproved the hypothesis. Wow, look at how powerful our AI is, you don't even need to be a world-class mathematician, you just tell it to solve a problem and it does!

By contrast, what the world-class 2 mathematicians did was sat down and started working on their proof for over a year, using AI along the way to help with their research. A much more grounded and realistic use of these tools, but one that doesn't generate nearly as much hype as the alternative.

The cracks in OAI's story has been immediately disproven, and they seemingly plagiarized the work of the 2 and then threw the team of researchers and the 15 million dollars at the problem after the fact. It doesn't exactly bode well for their hype machine when you consider the chain of events here, which is why people care about this, as OAI's constant and incessant lies they spew every minute of every day is finally hopefully catching up to them, and right before their big IPO too.

Editing to add: And I think it's all such a shame. We live in a time with genuinely insanely cool technology that is doing some truly incredible, ground-breaking stuff, but it's all tainted by a gaggle of greedy sociopaths and reprobates whose only goal in life is to have the largest number in their bank accounts. LLMs could've been such an amazingly neutral and cool and useful tool had more level-headed people been at the wheel, but instead we're stuck with this childish bullshit and giving the likes of Sam Altman real power to enact societal collapse.


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ltononrotoday at 12:29 PM

>what the world-class 2 mathematicians did was sat down and started working on their proof for over a year

If they were not related to anthropic I'd probably agree with you. OpenAI is much more for science than they are imo. Anthropic culture is all about "machine go brrrr" more than all of the other labs. If they had access to better models they'd probably would've one-shotted the solution. When the creator of bun was just "vibe-sciencing" it was ok. There is little to no evidence that they've been working using AI in this problem for over a year. Maybe they've been working on the problem for decades. So many other scientist have. Are they better because they threw a prompt and let it go brr??

When we put this in the perspective of how agents are changing the landscape of math/science, true it is shitty and weird. When folks are saying these scientists by anthropic that vibe-science'd the solution are victims, just because they did it with a smaller model, it is not defensible imo. And credit loses meaning here. The credit is shared with all the scientists that contributed somehow with the data in the AI pre-pos/training and not the prompter.

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