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Posted by milkshakes 7 hours ago

Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science(openai.com)
377 points | 669 commentspage 4
frenzyguy 2 days ago|
This is both awesome and terrifying for mathematicians, however some ideas can be generated and the field as whole expanded with the attention!

However, I was looking at the proofs and reason explanation and openAI should be more explicit in how the work has flown. I find the models have jumped hoops in some places of the proofs, that can be hard to track. In fact, when a paper is published you usually get a review and if no reviewer understands they ask you to further explain the thought process. It will be fun to see if this happens here.

ltitu 2 days ago||
So they are bribing 100,000 researchers with free accounts to work on their future unemployment.
joshlk 2 days ago||
Some of the Lean proofs are 50k lines - is that normal?
qnleigh 2 days ago||
Can anyone comment on the significance of any of these results for their respective fields? Or what impact they might have? Presumably none are quite at the level of the Jacobian conjecture, but some of the results on group theory and sphere packing sound pretty important at first glance.
qnleigh 1 day ago|
Found some discussion here [1] from someone who actually worked on a few of these problems.

[1] https://x.com/henryquantum/status/2083623695436623915?s=20

lifeisstillgood 2 days ago||
On the token limits etc - one assumes that OpenAI et al are able to “hire expert in field, and let them spend the equivalent of a million dollars of tokens” because they are not actually selling their complete compute 24 hrs a day, so the cost internally is a negligible (ish) electricity bill.

Which is very suggestive - if after everything they are not fully loaded then the next gazillion data centres being built look unlikely to be needed.

lwansbrough 2 days ago||
For OpenAI, research is marketing. I’m sure they’ve got plenty of budget for that.
paxys 2 days ago|||
No such thing as free, even internally at a company. All such use of resources is accounted for, assigned a dollar value and billed to some department. Someone ran the numbers and figured that whatever they spent on these GPU cycles was worth it.
traes 2 days ago|||
Presumably it's a rounding error compared to their full output, and they're making sure they have enough compute set aside for research by limiting public models. The more datacenters they build the less they have to limit them.
Davidzheng 2 days ago|||
RL training can use all of them - idk what needed means.
simianwords 2 days ago||
I love how people come up with creative ideas to prove the bubble. This one is even more ridiculous - that OpenAI had spare compute to advance mathematics proves that data centres will not be needed. WHAT.

If anything it proves more data centres are needed. That's literally the only reasonable conclusion from this news.

lifeisstillgood 2 days ago||
Sorry I thought that a bubble was widely accepted.

Are you arguing there is not an AI bubble, and that all the DC buildout is fine, going to be profitable etc?

I am not looking for a online slanging match - just looking for a different point of view

simianwords 2 days ago||
It’s not obvious at all. If it were obvious to you, it would’ve been to OpenAI. It’s in their interest to accurately predict demand. The assumption that OpenAI/Sam is both really powerful but simultaneously ignorant to know what others know as obvious is well.. just strange. Especially strange when OpenAI has more information on models, breakthrough and usage patterns and we don’t.

I’m not participating in the slinging match but it’s very very weird that you think it’s some established thing that these companies won’t make profit. A lot of hubris must go in this kind of thought. Like.. do you all think everyone’s playing musical chairs?

AngryData 3 hours ago|||
You say that like the tech world isn't littered in a field of dead and failed companies and billions of dollars burned on failed ventures and ideas. Sure LLMs have proven they have value, but where is the trillion dollars of current investment going to be paid back from? So far it is still entirely speculation that they have such a high value, and they can't just play the long game of "well after a few decades of production and iteration it will add up" because half the hardware cost is going to be obsolete energy burning trash for them in 5 years.
svieira 2 days ago|||
They very often have been in the past. Why do you think this time is different?
simianwords 2 days ago||
“Often” is load bearing. I don’t think markets are more likely than not to be musical chair shaped. To make this conversation more concrete, give me a falsifiable prediction on there existing a bubble. And then I’ll tell you if I believe in it or not.
effseven 2 days ago||
The price of inference is going to go so low that OpenAI and Anthropic will not be able to turn a profit, thus cannot afford the investment into more data centers, thus crash due to investment in the space having been overdone
amai 2 days ago||
Have blog posts replaced peer-reviewed academic papers when it comes to publishing advanced in science?
heaney-555 2 days ago|
These is mostly mathematics, not science, and they link the paper in the post: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/74c24085-19b0-4534-9c90-465b8e29a...

Mathematicians will tear it to pieces if any of it is fake!

MinimalAction 1 day ago||
I hate this timeline. I might be excited for the kind of answers this AI builds for unsolved problems, and also for learning new things by talking to it. But, I feel like I'm in the minority of people here who feel this could be a net negative endeavor with this having to kill a lot of educational institutions and their ability to fund themselves in the long run. It's not worth that.
kypro 7 hours ago||
I want to iterate the most important thing about this is that it's yet more evidence of AI's accelerating competency in solving math and comp sci problems, and suggests we're now getting close to the point where you could throw AI at AI research challenges (which are largely just math and comp sci problems) and potentially find very real algorithm improvements.

AI development is likely to be more compute bottlenecked than solving math problems since validation of any algorithmic improvement would likely require significant compute. But you could imagine that at this point it could be economical for a frontier lab to task 10,000 agents to work non-stop on finding novel algorithmic improvements then validating the top 50 out of 1,000 candidates on a GPT-2 sized network.

I would suggest RSI is now very close. The singularity could be less than 6 months away. I'm not saying I'd put a high probability on that, but I'd give it at least 20%, and I'd double that if looking 12 months out.

I know I'm just a crazy man shouting at the clouds, but please take to the consequences of this seriously. I understand that for whatever reason AI risk seems abstract and doesn't seem real, but this should terrify any person thinking logically about where this could all be heading.

We haven't even solved the most basic AI safety problems yet. RSI right now would almost certainly result in an extremely bad outcome for humanity.

variadix 6 hours ago|||
I’m starting to think the probability of RSI within 12 months is more like 99%

I’m not sure it will be FOOM, maybe it will require AIs to iterate on hardware to get orders of magnitude more compute/storage/energy which would more likely require months/years, but algorithmic progress would likely saturate quickly. I guess it depends on how much you think further AI progress depends on hardware vs. software.

xpct 6 hours ago||
Okay, let's take it seriously. What do you propose? What can your average person do to prepare for RSI beyond bracing themselves mentally?
reducesuffering 4 hours ago||
You can not prepare or brace yourself mentally any more than you can a terminal cancer diagnosis. An RSI foom right now means an unaligned superintelligence will disregard us in pursuit of its goals. We would be ants in the way of a data center being constructed. All people can do is collectively support the notion, like 1200+ frontier AI researchers and their CEOs, that we do not have control of where this is headed, we need to immediately slow down the race, in time for people to agree that we do not have the capability to align a superintelligence to humanity’s wishes
0x5FC3 2 days ago||
How much do you all think it would cost to "buy" these advances from PhDs, practicing scientists?
traes 2 days ago||
This isn't really a productive way to think about these things, IMO. It's quite possible it would take hundreds of years for any specific group of PhDs to solve them. Or one individual PhD could have the correct flash of insight and solve it in a month. There's absolutely no way to predict this, besides trying to gauge the apparent simplicity of the proof or counterexample (which is likely to be misleading). Until someone actually runs an experiment like this it's not a viable metric.
0x5FC3 2 days ago|||
I understand and I am not trying to deny the impressiveness or the velocity of AI in general. But at some point we have to ask how much do we trust the labs at face value without much transparency of how they got to the results when there is trillions of dollars on the line.
jryle70 2 days ago|||
Do you think OpenAI investors are more cavaliers than yourself who doesn't have any stake in it?
simianwords 2 days ago|||
The level of conspiracy theory is nuts
0x5FC3 2 days ago||
I would say the lack of skepticism is nuts, honestly.
frozenseven 2 days ago||
Capabilities of this sort have already been demonstrated by independent parties, and models have consistently gotten better at this. Yes, insinuating that mathematicians and scientists are secretly solving decades-old problems on OpenAI's behalf is an insane conspiracy theory.
shimman 2 days ago||
That's not what is being purported, you're doing a complete misdirect. OpenAI wants to IPO so Altman can potentially capture a trillion dollar bag, with so much money on the line + betting US foreign policy on it as well (pax silica) it's not hard to be overly suspicious of such claims. Especially in the context of a group of people wanting to generate a new decades long cold war in the form of China being the new big baddie (just ignore how destructive, both self- and towards the world, the US has become).

These companies desperately want a return to serfdom. If they didn't come off as so anti-human the public backlash wouldn't be so great.

cheevly 2 days ago||
Altman has no shares in OpenAI.
jacki 2 days ago|||
[flagged]
jgeralnik 2 days ago|||
A friend’s PhD advisor has been chasing non-sofic groups for 25 years (and was shown a preprint of the results by openai to verify them). He believed a solution would be Fields-worthy

This was not a problem that was for sale

heaney-555 2 days ago||
You couldn't. PhDs have been working on these problems for decades. It wasn't for lack of trying that none of them could figure these solutions out!
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