Oai-math-revised: a community hub for revising OpenAI's math write-ups (terrytao.wordpress.com)

45 pointsby tokepi17 hours ago34 comments

sdenton4 15 hours ago

Feels like we need a new truth-state for mathematics: "Verified-but-Unproven" for results which we know to be true through formal verification, but without any coherent proof.

I would generally expect this state to resolve quickly to "Proven and Verified" (the tendency in mathematics historically has been for complicated first-proofs of results, followed by significant reductions in proof complexity as new tools and definitions become available), but may still be useful for assigning real credit to who/whatever produces reasonable proof for a brute-force-verified result.

cadamsdotcom 13 hours ago

Sounds like a 2x2 matrix.

bemtevi 10 hours ago

> I would generally expect this state to resolve quickly to "Proven and Verified" (the tendency in mathematics historically has been for complicated first-proofs of results, followed by significant reductions in proof complexity as new tools and definitions become available),

A bit of an oversimplification, I think. Definitely there are some simplifications, but I wouldn't say really significant to the point where "resolve quickly" follows, along the lines of what you said.

Most complicated math is still nearly as complicated as when it was invented. Simplifications to presentation maybe, and some reduction in the proof difficulty yes, but not to the point of being significant in the way you describe. Any modern result that has been around for 20 years likely hasn't undergone a serious simplification, for example.

jerf 6 hours ago

Last I checked (a few weeks ago, but things have been moving faster lately), the four-color theorem remains "computer proved". There has been work done on it since the original proof that has successfully simplified it, in the sense that those proofs involve less grinding through cases than the original. But it still involves grinding through more cases than can be sensibly labelled a "human comprehensible" proof, with some sort of insight into the problem space. It's still just a big set of cases being checked, and a useful final result, but no insight given in the proof.

This seems like an interesting test case to build up for AI models.

vishna 15 hours ago

This is OpenAI’s etc version of getting unpaid internships from phd students

curt15 12 hours ago

The announcement doesn't say that the work will be using openai tools. If anything, the events over the past two months provide strong incentive to boost the capabilities of open-weight, local models.

sebzim4500 10 hours ago

How does any of this benefit OpenAI? They already got the headlines, it's not like its going to be front page news when the mathematical community actually understands the results that have already been claimed.

reasonableklout 8 hours ago

I think the argument is that OpenAI should have done the work of cleaning up the proofs in the first place before dumping them onto the math community (or worked with mathematicians to guide the research process). It's as if an energy company dumped 20 tons of waste next to a village and the townspeople decided to clean it up. "How does this benefit the energy company" might not be the right question to be asking.

simianwords 6 hours ago

this is a strange analogy. no one is forcing the math community to read this

howunfortunate 5 hours ago

I'm struggling with the right analogy but the "waste" is more like...idk, hundreds of those giant crates they go through on antique shows.

The contents are actually extremely valuable, it's better to have them then not, but it still takes nontrivial expert work to sort and parse them.

thatsabadlook 7 hours ago

Uh the ultimate training data... Turning their slop into human accessible anything even if proven wrong is training data they should be paying tens of millions of dollars for.

turzmo 15 hours ago

If mathematicians didn't enjoy digging their own graves with formalization before, perhaps they will enjoy digging their own unmarked, mass graves now?

pixl97 14 hours ago

We should burn the excavators and dig holes with our hands.

unknownian 7 hours ago

“We should give the password for our university laptops running LaTeX to the robots and go sit at home.”

dreijs 7 hours ago

I have not been following recent developments, but does anyone know what the general sentiment among mathematicians is about these proofs: does it look like they hold up?

I know that at least two of the problems, the Unique Games Conjecture and Barnette's Conjecture, were very significant. It's probably too early to tell, but is there a feeling that these are now solved, or not?

QuesnayJr 5 hours ago

The two most signficant number theory ones are considered solved: Quasi-Riemann and no Landau-Siegal zeros. Quanta has an article (https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-proved-the-quasi-riemann-h...) reporting that experts agree that the Quasi-Riemann Hypothesis has been proven. The "no Landau-Siegal zeros" proof already has several manuscripts giving expositions of the proof.

athrowaway3z 14 hours ago

This experiment might be relevant: https://github.com/offline-ant/wiggums-proof-loop

1293475 15 hours ago

The authors are all in computational mathematics and AI. This is the soft power version of the OpenAI repo to get people to work for free. Maybe call it OpenOpenAI.

pred_ 3 hours ago

How about instead, we reject the premise that OpenAI should get away with being lazy and incompetent by dumping a bunch of slop and letting researchers do all the work for free, while they still get credit?

If they want to pretend that they can do maths, they should do maths.

bemtevi 10 hours ago

I personally would never participate in this. I think clarifying proofs generated by a machine is a contemptible way to spend time. A lot of people will ask, isn't the purpose of math to generate results? I don't think so. I think the purpose of math is to gain a precise and clear understanding of the world through a shared human practice of math - human only.

I know most people here will disagree because most people here are at the top of the consumption food chain of just consuming the latest and greatest of whatever the world produces, so why not have more to consume? But slowly the joy is being sucked out of the world by AI for those not at the top and being replaced the narcissistic activity of enjoying superficial sensory stimulation in a vacuum.

A rather sad state of affairs...

coderenegade 9 hours ago

But pure math is a game that only cares about the rules and definitions as you choose to define them. It's not about understanding the world at all. The application of math in science (which is about understanding the world) is usually (but admittedly not always) after the fact.

_vertigo 2 hours ago

Leaving your “math is for humans” take alone, if the purpose of math is to “gain a precise and clear understanding of the world”, why is clarifying results a contemptible way to spend time?

lukax 14 hours ago

And now they can train on everything this community does. And with new models this community won't be needed anymore.

nostrebored 14 hours ago

right, and this would be a positive for the world.

qwr186 14 hours ago

Yes, only Nvidia should exist. r/accelerate nutcase?

clircle 14 hours ago

It might be a positive. It might not be. Better to have some humility about the situation.

greyw 14 hours ago

There are always people left behind by technological changes. Better move forward than cling to the past.

weknowbetter 13 hours ago

Is your implication that progress is always generally positive for the average person?

greyw 12 hours ago

My implication is that being left behind is worse than other choices.

reasonableklout 8 hours ago

Or we can show some compassion, and work towards a society that both benefits from technology and doesn't discard people at a moment's notice.

fergonco 14 hours ago

For a world. A world some people will not be part of.

boothby 10 hours ago

We’ve seen time and time again that "a positive for the world" is not something these companies align on

GoWaitInTheVan 13 hours ago

Have we ruled out Trisolarian involvement? IYKYK

aorth 3 hours ago

Three Body Problem :)