Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobrussell | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think solving a millennium prize problem can be reduced to some DoorDash economics of “spent Y to make X.” What if it took someone their entire professional career to solve one of these problems, would it not be worth it by the same logic?

View on HN

Surprisingly this is actually rather fitting in terms of time scale. When you consider it took ~10,000 agents 88 hours, or 880,000 hours to solve. That's 14.5 years in agent time of continuous 365/24/7 processing. Of course, humans solve things much more efficiently (and didn't also need the massive pre-training of every expert on the planet for 1,000,000,000 human years equivalent). But yeah, human researchers can solve a problem like this in a decade or so, while sleeping, teaching, traveling, and taking breaks, only working a few hours a day on the idea.

How many people have worked on this problem? How many have failed? How many hours total?

> But yeah, human researchers can solve a problem like this in a decade or so

None of them did, though, despite how many tried. So empirically, it seems unreasonable to say human researchers can solve ‘problems like this’.

Well, I guess we can say that human researchers have a certain probability of solving problems like this?

The entire controversy was that researchers were about to release their proof which OpenAI claimed to simultaneosululy discover. The proof is the researchers in question.

Of course, you're right. I was making social commentary / joke.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com