alt Hacker NewsOpenAI solving all these math/etc problems (reportedly 100 coming) is both impressive and insanely unimpressive. Unimpressive because to me it sorta signals that OpenAI has nothing better to be working on than obscure mathematical curios?
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No it signals that they can do few things very well. And among those few things are those math puzzles.
I think they should now focus on robotics, so it can do my dishes while I work on fun math games.
Attempting to solve & solving open math problems probably is a good benchmark for comparing models and gauging model progression. A lot of useful info is obtained like time needed to solve the problems, identifying when not to chase dead ends, thought processes & logic steps, etc.
Disagree. We are at the point where coming up with good evals for these models is extremely difficult. Solving unsolved math problems is a valid way of evaluating model progress and somewhat necessary to understand how far the current crop of models can go.
Nothing in TFA seems to imply that this was solved by OpenAI. This looks like an independant researcher.
Consider that their internal use of AI is likely pretty math and science heavy.
I think the publicity is a nice to have. They need models like this for in-house use.
Technically, this isn’t OpenAI directly.
Correct.
There are many things I want to do - that would require me to hire a team of 50 people.
I don’t want to do that nor can I afford to. Can OAI focus on enabling me to do this? I don’t care about this other stuff.
Just like many things in life - if it doesn’t show up in the economy it’s irrelevant.
well, you could say that for plenty of academic research but their value is usually not obvious at the start.
That's silly. I'm sure calculus was considered obscure when Newton developed it -- time is what's needed to judge if something is useful or not.
Your comment implies that this is all that they're working on, which does not seem substantiated.