Posted by pr337h4m 20 hours ago
I think LLMs can help in limited cases like this by just coming up with a different way of approaching a problem. It doesn’t have to be right, it just needs to give someone an alternative and maybe that will shake things up to get a solution.
That said, I have no idea what the practical value of this Erdős problem is. If you asked me if this demonstrates that LLMs are not junk. My general impression is that is like asking me in 1928 if we should spent millions of dollars of research money on number theory. The answer is no and get out of my office.
By looking the website this problem was never discussed by humans. The last comments were about gpt discovering it. I was expecting older comments coming to a 60 year old problem.
Am I missing something?
Great discovery though, there might be problems like that same case that worth a try for a "gpt check"
If models are able to pull and join information that already existed in pieces but humankind never discovered by itself, doesn’t this count towards progress anyways?
If the reason it was able to output the proof is that it happened to be included in an in-house university report written in Georgian, then that would make it less useful for research than if it's new entirely.
"An amateur just solved a 60-year-old math problem—by asking AI"
A more honest title would be:
"An AI just solved a 60-year-old math problem—after being asked by amateur"
(Imagine the headline claimed instead that a professor just solved a math problem by asking a grad student.)