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Comment by znnajdla | Hacker News Reader

I think the author is not aware of how much the Millennium Prize proof was actually driven by a human working for years towards that problem. The AI did not solve this on its own. A world class mathematician prompted it towards the proof. In my view, this is still a human achievement, not an AI achievement.

If I design a bulldozer to push a five ton rock, did I push the rock or the bulldozer?

If the AI really did get the Millennium Prize, then why can't you get a Millennium Prize when you have access to the exact same model in ChatGPT?

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You could say that about every scientific/mathematical breakthrough. Einstein's Special relativity depended heavily on Lorentz's work, the Michelson-Morley experiments, Maxwell's equations. Grigori Perelman, the only person to have solved a Millenium Prize problem, noted how his work was only possible due to Richard S. Hamilton's work on Ricci flow.

Most scientific breakthroughs are just the completing the last 5% of work already done, but that last 5% is very hard and still only happens very rarely. That an AI was able to synthesize all the work and bring it forward is evidence that AI can make novel progress on the same level as renown mathematicians.

Einstein literally stated he was not influenced by the Michelson-Morley experiments, but it's a common myth that he was.

"When Ι asked him how he had learned of the Michelson Morley experiment, he told me that he had become aware of it through writings of Η. Α. Lοrentz, but only after 1905 had it come to his attention! "Otherwise" he said, "I would have mentioned it in my paper!" indeed, Einstein's 1905 paper contains no mention of Μichelson's experiment or references to Lorentz's papers."

From https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/89375/did-einste...

Correcting a professor at MIT (head of the department alas) on this erroneous belief during a grad school interview cost me admission as he insisted otherwise and wouldn't back down. Ironically, one of my college professors was interviewed on NPR a week later and confirmed what I had stated.

Ask me what I think of checked out, tenured academics. Go ahead...

That may be true, but Lorentz specifically cited the MM experiments and was influenced by them, and Einstein cited and was influenced by Lorentz, so he was influenced, just one level removed.

>https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-663-19510-8_...

Which he only became aware of after the paper...

In this 1905 special relativity paper he mentions "the Lorentzian electrodynamics and optics of moving bodies"

https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/specrel.pdf

And did you read the footnote on the first page?

"The preceding memoir by Lorentz was not at this time known to the author."

It may also have been a social test — ie the polite thing to do in that circumstance is to say “oh wow, I thought I knew that one, weird. I’ll have to look that up again thank you” even if you know 100% that you’re correct. Weird social expectation thing.

It was the 1980s and that very well may have been what was going on, but if that's the game they're going to play then I have better places to play games. Ironically, I got several apologies from other MIT professors a few years later who ended up working with me on various things.

> That an AI was able to synthesize all the work and bring it forward

But that's not what it did. A mathematician literally prompted it towards that, helping it every step of the way for years.

And only the mathematician was able to make the AI do that. Anybody else with the same AI could not do the same thing.

If you think it was the AI that solved a Millennium Prize, then why don't you try using ChatGPT to get a Millennium Prize?

>If you think it was the AI that solved a Millennium Prize, then why don't you try using ChatGPT to get a Millennium Prize?

The model which did the NS solution is not yet available to the public, and it required over 15 million dollars of tokens (based on API pricing) to produce the solution.

>And only the mathematician was able to make the AI do that. Anybody else with the same AI could not do the same thing.

That is only speculation, the total sum of the prompt's help to the model could have just been suggesting research directions. Also mathematicians talk to each other and use/learn from each others' research all the time. Should every mathematician, in order to produce a "legitimate" proof, lock themselves in a room for the entire duration of their work and ensure no one else helped?

> If I design a bulldozer to push a five ton rock, did I push the rock or the bulldozer?

Unequivocally the bulldozer. You get to take the blame in design of the bulldozer, though.

The law (which is supposed to codify the common sense and shared values underpinning a society—note "supposed to") disagrees with you: if I use a bulldozer to damage your property, you can sue me, not the bulldozer or its maker.

Sure, legally.

But practically speaking, who did the heavy lifting? The operator or the machine?

Everyone who's ideas made bulldozer possible, I would say..

This is copium. Humans worked on it, but they didn't come close to actually solving it. Even if you do the whole "the AI looked at material in its training data" thing, modern AI can make their own math data to train on with RLVF. This new model is legitimately on a different plane of existence from modern mathematicians.

Using the word "copium" is a "if you smelt it you dealt it" type of deal.

it should be able to solve some of the five left Millenium Prize problems then in a few weeks.

Why in weeks, not months or years?

Probably will solve a couple more at least in the coming year , no ? Why wouldn't it ?

My point is, the AI could not have done what it did without the skilled mathemetician prompting it. It was just a tool in the hands of the human that did it. And that was a very skilled human. Unless you're a professional mathematician, you cannot get the same result even if you use the same AI model. That's the proof that it's the human's work, not the AI.

Why don't you try getting a Millennium Prize then? If you think it was the AI that did it, you have access to the exact same ChatGPT.

I don't have access to the exact agent OpenAI used, and I certainly don't have access to the enormous amount of tokens that were used. That being said, I doubt there was some advanced prompting technique going on here. We've seen AI proofs with the prompts attached, and it's pretty basic stuff like "don't give up".

I think you're not aware of the specifics of this case. A mathematician worked on the prompts for over a year to get this proof. Look up the details.

We don't know what the prompts were though. Terence Tao showed of some of his, and they are indeed huge, with lots of context, things that might work, things he knows don't etc. What we do know about this, is that 10k agents worked together on this. The initial prompt, while probably still very relevant, would get diluted over time. We simply don't know the level of inolvement of humans in reaching this proof.

My point is if you're not a mathematician on the level of Terence Tao you wouldn't have been able to get this result.

Thus, AI cannot be credited with the result. Because it's not AI that did it, it's the human that used it as a tool to get the result.

No, no, you don't get it - soon Joe Sixpack will be prompting AGI "solve me {super difficult problem researchers couldn't solved for centuries}" and releasing their own research papers!

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