OpenAI Just Claimed a Huge Math Discovery. Some Academics Are Crying Foul
www.wired.com
A landmark announcement by the frontier AI lab has been overshadowed by accusations of impropriety.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9497419

The Millennium Problems are a set of the most important open problems in mathematics. so far only 2 have been solved: the Poincare Conjecture by Grigori Perelman in 2010 and today OpenAI released this https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

The only problem is, that their AI didn’t even come up with the solution itself. Mathematicians working on the same problem recently made big strides in solving the Navier Stokes equations, and their chat logs were scraped and used in training data before they could release the proof themselves.

Here is the unpaywalled statements of the Mathematician: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117233413705701198

Western AI companies have been tackling a bunch of open problems and techbro chuds cannot shut up about it, this is just Marketing and the fact they have to steal real people’s work to do so just proves it. They really want that IPO moneyyy capitalist-laugh

  • mystic-macaroni@lemmy.ml
    14·
    7 hours ago

    Woah. Navier Stokes has been solved? That’s a huge deal. And fuck openai for undercutting the people who made it possible.

    • onceandfuturealice@lemmy.world
      1·
      59 seconds ago

      From what I’ve read, the Millennium prize proposition was basically “Prove it holds in all cases (sounds to me like a closed form solution), or prove it doesn’t hold in all cases”, and the proof published by OpenAI proves the latter, i.e. that Navier-Stokes does not hold in some extreme cases.

    • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
      7·
      6 hours ago

      Well “solved” is a bit of a weird way to say it. Was it proven as true, or was it disproven? Both of those change things in different ways.

      Proven true that it is a stable formula, then that’s cool, and we know that issues with fluid simulations based off of that are a software and compute problem.

      If it was disproven, then we learn precisely under what specific conditions nature becomes mathematically unpredictable, and then we can start developing different and better models.

      • mystic-macaroni@lemmy.ml
        6·
        5 hours ago

        My understanding is that it has only been shown to have closed form analytical solution for very simple cases. “Solved” in this case would mean doing the same for more complex geometries. It would mean finding new functions like spherical harmonics or the Bessel Function.

    • loaExMachina [any]@hexbear.net
      4·
      2 hours ago

      The fact that AI had solved this problem made big noise, and was used by many to legitimize AI as a source of progress, so setting the record sttaight on how it really did is is pretty important.

      Beside, solving a millenial problem is a big deal. Even if it had been solved by human researchers and it was later found that they had plagiarized other human researchers, this would’ve been noteworthy. So I would say this is pretty special.

    • reallykindasorta@slrpnk.net
      21·
      9 hours ago

      It’s like if they wrote gta VI in notepad and Microsoft released it saying they made it… so not really different except they didn’t even let the author publish it first