alt Hacker NewsAccording to Scott Aaronsson, OpenAI set their agents on 8000 different problems, and got 372 final proofs. Even spending twice the original effort on simplifying and reworking those proofs so that they do not "feel like something written by someone who’s on psychedelics" would only increase the compute by less than 10% (assuming all the agents had a similar token budget).
The fact that they did not do so can only mean that either (1) their agents currently lack the capability to do it, or (2) OpenAI are completely indifferent and do not care in the slightest if the proofs are understood or not.
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lern_too_spel • today at 8:23 AM
Or (3) they feel a need to publish first, and that goal takes precedence over (2).
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> The fact that they did not do so can only mean that either (1) their agents currently lack the capability to do it, or (2) OpenAI are completely indifferent and do not care in the slightest if the proofs are understood or not.
Come now, this is kind of unreasonable. When you're working on a new technology, you first get the ugly, inconvenient-to-use prototypes functioning with the core new thing you need; then you work on packaging it up into a format useable in production. I'm sure the very first digital camera sensors weren't very useful for photographers either; but it isn't really even possible to build the rest of the technology required to turn raw output of a digital sensor into something a professional photographer can use until you have the raw output itself.
The research is still on going on the raw output; getting things to the next stage, where the results are widely useable by professional mathematicians (and then on to engineers and scientists to whom the results would be practically useful), is a whole new research area.