alt Hacker NewsAs per the post, this mathematician has been working on this problem for 20 years. So either he was "just" about to breakthrough and this is a big coincidence, or Astra was able to push through the remaining block of 5-10-20-never years it might have taken.
That's still a pretty big marker of competence in my eyes.
The point of controversy seems to be who gets credit
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The question's not new. In the early 1900s, women could not become PhD astronomers. Yet two women (Payne with stellar composition and Leavitt with cosmic distances) made fundamental, essential contributions to the science. Credit mostly went to male astronomers. The same might be said of Franklin and DNA.
It was nearly a century before the stories of all of them were revealed to public history. That the discoverers were not all equally rewarded is unjustifiable.
The big LLM providers, desperate for good PR before their IPOs, are all actively looking for 'almost finished' hard problems, e.g. where the conceptual / creative parts are almost done and they only need to throw their VC-backed resources at to brute-force through the remaining computationally expensive problem (lean, etc) and claim 'they have solved it'.
It's an utterly disrespectful, exploitive process, but all in line with exploitative predator capitalism of the stock market and big companies, now exploiting the knowledge / academia domain for scraps with a thin veneer of 'for science' PR.
To me that is not a credit thing because this removes a piece evidence for the ability of AI to come up with novel ideas while still making it a useful tool.