The fact that ETH is false when many people expected it to be true is the amazing thing. This isn't AI finishing the last 10% of a proof and stealing the credit--this is AI exceeding human thinking. If nothing else, this buries the "stochastic parrot" position.

That said, AI is spiky, and I fully expect there to be a class of problems that AI is really good at solving and a (maybe larger) class where AI is worse than human mathematicians.

> We do not seek academic credit for the discoveries produced by our internal models.

Sure. But that isn't what they really cared about anyway. They care about notoriety among the general population, and especially among people who decide to pay for their products.

I do not like this at all. At best, we find that there are classes of problems that even AI cannot help much in solving, in the sense that the rationals are an infinitesimally small part of the reals. At worst, a fundamental result trivializes a problem whose complexity is a key component of a critical system, and there’s societal upheaval. If PhDs ran the government, and thought the latter, we might have already seen military attacks on data centers.

I'm incredibly skeptical about everything these frontier labs put out. Results are results though.

However, could someone with a firmer grasp on the problems weigh in on how much are these recent results are function of cutting a virtually unlimited budget for some very smart people? I believe the LLMs certainly help iterate on ideas faster... but I am aware of very impressive work that goes on in quantitative finance. Stuff that would not really be published. That stuff is the result of paying smart people millions to produce results which produce $$$.

I have to wonder, would this have been solved if we simply gathered tons of smart people and paid them a ton of money to solve it? Or is it exclusively because they had access to LLMs?

Could they have achieved this result with previous versions of ChatGPT?

Does this bring us closer to an unconditional basic income?

I hate being alive during this time

The question is what are these discoveries going to mean in the long run.

Scott Aaronson of Shtel Optimzed and now at OpenAI has a great podcast episode discussing this -worth watching

https://youtu.be/3yXtXTwz4J4?si=mmePkdRBQrlO3BlD