Comment by isotypic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by isotypic | Hacker News Reader

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To quote Noam Brown, "Our main focus is shipping great models so everyone can use them to make discoveries of their own" [1]. Spending 15 million dollars of compute with an internal model to blitz and scoop a resolution of Navier-Stokes that someone is already on track to resolve (or, from my understanding of why OpenAI did this, had already resolved, as staff at OpenAI stated their attempt was prompted by rumors of a resolution by Anthropic) is in complete opposition to this stated claim. That act is what this portion of the recommendation is in response to: OpenAI perpetually holding out internal models and tooling, using them to solve important problems in math, and thus themselves holding a monopoly on certain aspects of mathematics. Why is it absurd to ask people who are in a position to do an obviously damaging act to not do so, especially when those same people were the ones who asked for your advice in the first place and claimed to not want to do said act previously?

[1] https://x.com/polynoamial/status/2093451221273387477

Because it’s not a damaging act, to those who aren’t gatekeepers.

How so? All it does it move who the "gatekeepers" are. OpenAI continuing to pump math problems into their internal models will only mean that if you want to be on the cutting edge of mathematics problem solving, you have to have access to internal OpenAI models. It takes what was previously an incredibly open field -- basically every paper is freely available on the arXiv, any given topic has probably 5 textbooks -- and turns it into one where the frontier is in the hands of a single company. If you are so against "gatekeeping" -- which I assure you, mathematicians are not doing, if you personally use an LLM to solve an important problem and write it up nicely (keyword: nicely) nobody will be mad at you -- why are you so happy to place the field into the hands of a singular entity?

>if you want to be on the cutting edge of mathematics problem solving, you have to have access to internal OpenAI models.

that is the way of technology. If i want to be just in the middle of the pack, not even a cutting edge, i have to buy a car, i can't just walk everywhere in reasonable time. I have to use a phone, i go to the doctor for modern medicine, etc. - note that pretty much everything is private companies goods and private services.

>where the frontier is in the hands of a single company.

We did invent anti-monopoly laws though to address such major issues with the private origin of the goods and services, and of course AI companies should be subject to it too (if you noticed, by stocking the scare of AI the BigAI companies are actually trying to get the anti-monopoly laws relaxed for them - and this is where our attention should be, the rest is just red herring)

>It takes what was previously an incredibly open field

It was nice riding a horse among the open rolling hills.

How about not trying to be always on the cutting edge ? Is mathematics a sport ?

Doing research is by definition to be on the cutting edge.

AI labs don't even need models to out compete mathematicians, they can employ enough mathematicians to out compete those who are not affiliated.

The questions is whether if we want research to be held in a oligopoly.

It directly undermines human achievement - something some people have spent a lifetime in pursuit of - for the sake of marketing. OpenAI gains nothing at all; the mathemeticians on the verge of achieving a lifelong pursuit have their entire career trajectory and perhaps reason for being eviscerated without a thought. If the goal is to further mathematics, the mathemeticians are the ones who would best understand whether what OpenAI is doing is helping or hurting.

The only reason the world has mathematics at all is because of mathematicians. Most of the value in these results is to the people who understand them, not to some random fantasy science fiction project you’re imagining is going to happen because navier stokes is solved.

Frontier labs aren't under any obligation to release every model they develop. Either way, I don't see much evidence that they're withholding them in perpetuity. Open models aren't far behind so there's no incentive for that.

Difficult math problems are useful benchmarks and milestones. It's well worth throwing money at solving a problem if it drives competition and improves models significantly. The benefits become available to everyone, including the thousands of professional mathematicians who can use them to become more productive.

> Open models aren't far behind so there's no incentive for that. "But inference costs play a massive role here too, which I think is still the biggest bottleneck in AI development. Running high-impact models for math, medicine, or programming requires a ton of compute. Throw in the politicization of everything AI-related, and it feels like model privatization is just the tip of the iceberg."

>was prompted by rumors of a resolution by Anthropic

reminds an old sci-fi story where top engineers were shown a video of a genius inventor who invented anti-gravity and unfortunately died while testing his apparatus which was clearly anti-gravitating in the video. Thus believing that it is a solved problem, just need to rediscover the lost solution, the engineers quickly developed anti-gravity. The original video happened to be a fake specially created for that purpose.

>thus themselves holding a monopoly on certain aspects of mathematics

Monopoly prevents others. In science me knowing something doesn't prevent others from obtaining the same knowledge, especially in math where any knowledge is just a result of thinking.

The math establishment is trying to bring into the math the rules and notions similar to those of the patent and trademark laws. Those attempts should be outright rejected.

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