alt Hacker NewsOK, good to know (if they can be trusted - Altman clearly is a liar), but it doesn't really change the big picture much.
1) OpenAI by their own admission, only re-tackled Navier-Stokes because they heard it had already been solved (but not yet published). This isn't advancing science or helping the mathematical community, this is just being a dick.
2) OpenAI, specifically Sebastien Brubeck, then threaten to "not be nice" and "ruin the career" of one of the mathematicians whose work they had succeeded in duplicating, unless he agreed (which he refused to do) that his collaborator, an Anthropic employee, was not named. This is not only against mathematical norms of credit assignment, it is also being a pathetic human being.
OpenAI would have you believe this result shows how powerful their mystery better-than-Astra model is, but the reality here is that this model needed 10,000 agents, $20M of compute, and the assistance of a whole team of people at OpenAI, to replicate (then exceed) the work that just took two people, with some academic grants as an AI spending budget to achieve (a few $100K - listed below).
https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/
I'd say advantage humans this time. Better luck next time OpenAI - and if you don't want unfavorable comparisons then maybe choose to work on problems that have not been solved yet, and that humans are NOT making nice progress on.
Replies
>Better luck next time OpenAI
Well it looks like they will announce at least one other millenium solution soon. In the same link they say they have "made substantial progress" on another millenium problem. The rumor mill before that statement was Hodge is done and Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer is on its way out.
> and that humans are NOT making nice progress on
They've pretty much said their own work was heavily agent driven. Levent is in a particularly bad place here because while he probably had a lot of background in the Jacobian Conjecture problem, he made the solution to that one sound like someone asked the question and he just fed it to Fable during the world cup. Whether that nonchalantness was to just seem hip or was to promote Anthropic, which he has stock in, or was just the truth I don't know though. But it makes this one seem similar, when they might have had really had nearly a year of very valuable feedback to the models.
1. I would agree if the rumours were that some mathematician(s) had solved them, but the rumors alleged it was Anthropic. I don't really see what the big deal was. They had a new model that was going along great and wanted to test its mettle.
2. Yes Brubeck's comments were weird at face value. That said, Open AI's proof isn't a duplication of anything. Not only is Tristan's work a sub problem but the methods are different. And what OpenAI didn't want was Levant on the paper OpenAI authored not whatever they were working on (Euler). It's petty sure but it's fair enough. Tristan and Levant didn't have anything to do with the Navier Stokes solution, so it's really their call if they didn't want to collaborate on their own paper with the Anthropic employee.
>OpenAI would have you believe this result shows how powerful their mystery better-than-Astra model is, but the reality here is that this model needed 10,000 agents, $20M of compute,
$20M in approximated API prices doesn't mean they spent $20M worth of compute. The real number would obviously be substantially less.
>and the assistance of a whole team of people at OpenAI
You can't eat your cake and have it. What sort of guidance do you think is happening in a 10k agent, 320b token, 88 hour run ? AI did this one.
>I'd say advantage humans this time....to work on problems that have not been solved yet, and that humans are NOT making nice progress on.
Interesting way to frame progress that didn't move along till an LLM generated proof.