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Posted by tedsanders 9 hours ago

An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry(openai.com)
804 points | 591 commentspage 6
3422817 5 hours ago|
Nice. By the year 2100 200 Erdos problems will have been solved by AI. Let's build more data centers.
Kye 7 hours ago||
Is this something that can be made explainable to someone without any of the relevant background, or is this one of those things where all that background is needed to understand it? Because I have no idea what's going on here, but would like to.
empath75 8 hours ago||
Important note: this was not done with a special mathematics harness or specialized workflow.
horhay 4 hours ago||
This part of the announcement holds no value besides maybe taking a shot at the Deepmind Co-Mathematician paper. Nearly every mathematical success they've achieved around the GPT 5.2 generation has been done with general (and even public) models. Their last bountied problem solved was done with 5.4 Pro, also a general model.
dwroberts 7 hours ago||
How/why should we know this, it does not explain the process in the text?
mrcwinn 6 hours ago||
The back and forth in this discussion reveals to me we are sorting through a kind of philosophical debate about intelligence. That alone tells me LLMs are doing something novel.
somewhereoutth 7 hours ago||
The real test would be if an LLM makes an important conjecture.
iLoveOncall 5 hours ago||
Absolutely no proof that any LLM actually found the result, and just a mention of an "internal model". Served to you by one of the biggest liars in the world.

Why would anyone believe this to be true even for a split second?

varenc 4 hours ago|
This has been an unsolved open problem for 80 years. What you're suggesting is that someone connected to Open AI solved this very hard math problem, but then rather than taking credit for it, falsely attributed it to AI?

The point of having an AI solve an unsolved problem, is to make it very clear that the insight must have come from the AI and wasn't in the training data. Sure, it's possible OpenAI had access to some math professors that solved it and then let an AI model take the credit... but seems unlikely. That human would be turning down a potential Fields Medal for this discovery.

The abridged chain-of-thought from the model also serves as some evidence of LLM origin: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/1625eff6-5ac1-40d8-b1db-5d5cf925d... (could be fake, though I'm unsure what proof of LLM origin couldn't be faked)

neuroelectron 5 hours ago||
I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that AI is a grid of grid-calculating grids. It seems like it would be especially well suited to finding solutions about grids. That is until you consider the fact that even 1 trillion billion grids is still not anywhere close to an infinite grid. So, probably slop.
arsan87 7 hours ago||
neato. can we do any thing with this new found knowledge or is this mathematical sports?

can we please put these ground breaking AIs to work on actual problems humans have?

clarle 7 hours ago|
People thought neural networks were just an interesting thought exercise a few decades ago and not for practical ML problems, and look what happened since then.
analognoise 6 hours ago||
Back when “term rewriting” was “AI”, multiple math tools were released that took known math facts and did tricks like uncovering new integrals - apply the pattern in some depth in a tree, see what pops out.

What was discovered were numerous mistakes in the published literature on the subject. “New math! AI!” No, just mechanical application of rules, human mistakes.

There were things that were theorized, but couldn’t be exhaustively checked until computers were bigger.

Once again, a tool is applied, it has the AI label - its progress! But it isn’t something new. It’s just an LLM.

There’s a consistent under appreciation of AI (and math, honestly), but watching soulless AI mongers declare that their toy has created the new is something of a new low; uninspired, failed creatives, without rhyme or context; this is a bigger version of declaring that your spell checker has created new words.

The result is more impressive than what was done with tables of integrals and SAINT in 1961, sure.

Apparently if you add a “temperature” knob to a text predictor, otherwise sane individuals piss themselves and call it new.

Then again I thought NFTs, crypto, and the Metaverse were stupid, so what do I know.

epicsagas 2 hours ago|
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