Comment by keremk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keremk | Hacker News Reader

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Occam's Razor says: "They heard this problem is solved or about to be solved amongst the rest of the other problems. They prioritized this and put substantial compute with their newest model and solved it." I know everyone loves juicy rumors, theories etc. but honestly that is the simplest and most plausible explanation given the state of AI improvement now. Obviously spending 15 million on a problem is not a slam dunk decision even for a company like OpenAI but if it has a significantly high chance of solving it and their competitor will be claiming they solved it, then it raises the stakes and they go after it. In fact this is the most rational and also curiosity-driven thing to do and totally what I would have expected from any frontier lab. Of course if one wants to prove their confirmation biases that they train on sessions or be able to identify individual users, the non-zero chance of that being also another explanation is attractive enough to wet their appetites.

Isn't it also a simple idea that a model designed to recall relevant information from its training data, which is also known to have been trained on data from user transcripts, would, in fact, reproduce directly relevant work by leading experts in the field? Seems like Occam's razor would apply to that situation as well.

We know that LLMs are trained to recall relevant info. We know AI vendors are using user transcripts to train models. Two plus two equals four, right? I mean, an LLM that failed to recall the transcripts of those researchers would be a bad model.

Given that the solution took a somewhat “unusual” approach, I find it even more unlikely that an AI model would have come up with this on its own.

Isn't that *exactly* the type of solution you'd expect from AI?

Move 37 comes to mind.

Only if you understand nothing about the difference between LLMs and AlphaGo.

Why is that simple or plausible? Why is simpler or more plausible than lifting an almost-finished solution from a researcher's account?

Because they solved different problems, and where there was overlap, the solutions look different?

Because it is not finished. Their follow up claim is that OpenAI’s approach looks like another proof they had been working on the side, but hasn’t published yet

OpenAI have admitted their new model they used was trained on prompts at around the time that researcher was working on it, so it seems self evident that it was used as part of the millennium solution

1) Because AI models are 1000x better about following a problem to its conclusion than coming up with a genuinely new idea.

2) Because if we accept the facts ChatGPT only came up with its "new" idea after being told exactly what the new idea was by a mathematician (OpenAI doesn't dispute this btw). And OpenAIs story comes down to the usual "We didn't look at it, trust me bro", which is made more hard to believe because OpenAI only started their efforts after receiving news of what the researcher was doing.

Oh and OpenAI emphasizes that part of the researcher's progress was made ... on OpenAI.

3) And, probably, the researchers were likely stopped by token limits, and that's the only reason they were slower than OpenAI themselves, which is very, very unfair.

4) OpenAI's story "smells" (like so many AI stories lately). Supposedly the company's team asked ChatGPT about solving millennium problems, and out of all millennium problems it just happens to pick the one where a solution can be found in its chat logs?

5) Yet again it would be in good taste for these AI companies to just give this to the researchers (no shortage of difficult unsolved math problems, so if AI can solve them all, just find another one). But instead, yet again they're fighting about it.

6) OpenAI admits they only went after this problem, with a team, no less, after finding out which researcher went after what problem, because of how they thought it would affect ChatGPT's PR. They are demonstrating, in other words, their willingness to destroy human researcher's reputation for PR wins.

That's getting close to big tobacco level morals right there.

7) If anyone wants to verify how much OpenAI cares about the truth, just ask on ChatGPT about the copyright lawsuit outcome and how it applies to OpenAI.

You'll get EXACTLY the sort of responses you get from Qwen about Tiananmen ("we didn't do it, you have no data, everyone's lying and if we did do it, it was perfectly reasonable because " style argument. Try it)

I don’t know much about NS problem or Euler problem anyway. Can’t tell how significant it is to go from Tristan approach to OpenAI’s results.

It is 10k agents after all with a model that is 2x-3x more powerful than Astra. So claims some intuition is his alone and the model can’t find it independently is Tristan’s belief not the reality, which I don’t find particularly convincing.

I do think that Levent guy isn’t independent and indeed does have an enormous amount of tokens to spend and also on an internal model from Anthropic.

All things considered, I think OpenAI people are competitive, even aggressive. But I don’t think they steal anything. Ultimately, the model’s capability is the real surprise factor here, the fact they could get a solution after all in 3 days, that is the cause of drama, if it is 3 months, then it is a nothing burger, because by then the original results had already been published.

> Ultimately, the model’s capability is the real surprise factor here, the fact they could get a solution after all in 3 days, that is the cause of drama ...

And there we go, a beside-the-point answer that tries to bring it back to the PR claim. And of course, an unsupported PR claim: if the initial insight really did come from a human, that would indicate the model's capability either isn't there or didn't matter.

And sorry to say, but competitive adversarial rewards for humans + access to the answer always ends in peeking. In kindergarten. In universities. In Engineering firms. In Finance. No difference other than the justification afterwards. Humans peek in competitive settings. They just do. The fix is not "trust me bro", the fix is making sure they have no ability to do it in the first place.

And OpenAI's answer to the "did you peek at the answer?" is trust me, bro ... as per usual.

If OpenAI indeed played fair, then this is a serious "dick move", and not at all how academia is supposed to work. AND if they played fair OpenAI effectively attacked one of their customers here.

If OpenAI didn't play fair then this is stealing from their customers. Which at a different level is their whole business model (get training data from customers, who even pay for that, train better model with that data, charge more, repeat).

Funny how they did not solve any of the other problems, just the one where there was already solutions to the NS with some restrictions in their chats, and their solution seems to derive from those.

They explain in the article that they eventually redirected all their resources towards NS.

So instead of dictating research to unsolved, or largely unsolved, problems, we are now as "a society" directing compute power towards sniping research outcomes.

I thought this was an ebay thing for people with too much free money, but it seems a bit larger.

Considering how language models work, you'd expect two distinct conversations on the same mathematical problem to have enormous crossover.

There's also an elephant here in this room: Quite "coincidental" one of the coauthors worked for the competition. Of course GPT would know this fact. And OAI has every incentive to particularly monitor those accounts.-

I agree with Occam.

That 100x step up from using 100 agents for Euler to 100_000 agents for Navier-Stokes, in a single day seems a bit sus.

I also think this is not ethical behavior. This is at least academic dishonesty, kind of a plagiarism or intellectual theft.

That’s why they wanted to credit Tristan and to give $1M award to him. But again, they acted unethically in that process as well. They wanted him to remove Levent (Anthropic affiliation) as co-author and threatened Tristan to “end his career”. Their behavior is actually telling, their work was not completely independent from Tristan&Levent’s unpublished work.

This is not the simplest explanation.

The most direct line from problem to proof is OpenAI building off of conversations the mathematicians had with their AI.

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