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Discussion (167 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
As the OpenAI proof hasn't been officially published yet, the clock hasn't started ticking.
Though it would be funny if no one ever bothers publishing the result in an appropriate journal, and thus the prize technically can never be claimed.
Edit: Oh, didn't see the "qualifying outlet" condition. But Poincare was ever just put on arXiv, so arXiv must count as well.
I guess these little questions are what this article is really about.
Without limiting any other provision in this Section, a publication lacking any of the following characteristics will be deemed not to be a Qualifying Outlet:
i. an editorial board whose members are named and available for contact;
ii. an editor or editorial board member whose professional knowledge of the global mathematics community would enable him or her to identify an appropriate referee to review a submitted paper;
iii. a published refereeing process that, in the opinion of CMI, ensures that a submitted paper is reviewed and verified by appropriate experts in the field of the Problem; or
iv. inclusion in the list of publications maintained by MathSciNet.
The solution to the Poincaré conjecture was only accepted after an exposition of Perelman's proof was published in a refereed journal. His papers didn't qualify, but of course he got the credit for the result.
Strangely enough, the crackpots seems to prefer vixra.org to publish their work. I've never seen something like "4D wormholes can cure cancer" in ArXiv
If you make a new account, you either have to get someone to vouch for you, or you have to wait arXiv mods to look carefully through your first few preprints. If you are found to post pseudoscience, overly fringe theories, etc., you'll get banned from arXiv; that's why alternative repositories like vixRa.org popped up.
But I know why you think this; when I first joined arXiv many years, there were no such checks in place, at least not that I can remember.
This is all you need to read and understand for Anthropic's FLT formalization:
The actual proof is 13 million lines of Lean.It is interesting that AI-generated proofs are described as malicious by Lean docs unless reviewed.
Humans need to verify everything.
A similar rule existed for the 100-year Wolfskehl prize established in 1906 for solving Fermat's last theorem; two years after publication.
The statement is so sterile they don't even mention who solved it. The word "OpenAI" doesn't appear at all.
It's easy to get caught in the details of today. Our skepticism, our distrust, our loathing. For people, for companies.
This is a nice pull in the other direction, a silver lining. In the grand scheme of things, we're solving these frontier problems: Somebody did it and that's amazing.
That's what it was all about when this started of in 2000.
Keyword: New Technologies
Possibly because of the ongoing debate about who actually deserves credit.
That “apparently” feels load-bearing
Personally, I use the word "interrogate" when I want to question an idea without implying I want to discredit it.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/interrogation
You interrogate a proof.
Very on brand with using AI for everything.
1) The solution must be published in a qualifying outlet, i.e. a peer-reviewed math journal. Publishing on your own website (which is what OpenAI did) or posting arXiv does not count.
2) At least two full years must pass after publication in a qualifying journal, before CMI will even consider evaluating it. The intent is to give the maths community time to scrutinize the solution.
Realistically, they'll be eligible for a prize ~2.5 years from now, or around 2029.
While the scandal is still unraveling, it seems that OpenAI did a rush job to steal other mathematicians' thunder and finish the proof first.
OpenAI released a statement that their work does not relate to the work of the other team, but it clearly does. They use the same niche smooth-forcing mechanism. Altman and Bubeck claim that because the proof used different scaling parameters and analytical steps, it's not related, but it seems that nobody else agrees. Oh, and OpenAI's Bubeck tried to threaten Buckmaster (mathematician working on the proof).
This brings nothing but shame for OpenAI.
Tristan+Levent ticked the weakest case, OpenAI ticked the two next weakest, then the final case is unsolved. Only the last two are eligible for the Millennium Prize. The Navier-Stokes general case remains unsolved.
Navier-Stokes has an extra viscosity term compared to Euler, which makes the problem noticeably harder to find a blowup. They are not the same problem.
2) The approach both chose to use (by Luis and Diego) was published in 2023 and is included in every frontier model's training dataset. An AI model could independently choose the same route as Luis and Diego, without access to Buckmaster's work.
3) You mischaracterized OpenAI's statement. They issued a blanket denial on using Buckmaster's Codex data from after July 3.
"We can say categorically that it is impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training. After investigating, we can say with full confidence that no user inputs past July 3rd could have influenced this system in any way.”
July 3 was the training cutoff date for the model that solved Navier-Stokes. No user data after that date influenced the model.
4) Buckmaster and Alpöge found their blow-up for 3D incompressible Euler with forcing on August 15 https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf , over a month after the model training cutoff point. They stated they did not have real progress prior to this point.
“There does not seem to be anything in principle preventing the methods from extending all the way to Navier-Stokes, and there is even a non-negligible chance that the forcing term could be eliminated entirely, although there are an enormous number of technical difficulties that would ensue in implementing that program. At this point, I would not be surprised if one could batter out such an extension by pouring an enormous amount of compute and AI assistance at such a task…”
Pouring infinite AI resources into it is exactly what OpenAI did.
Is Altman even mathematican these days?
The Poincaré conjecture guy also broke that rule. They wanted to give him the prize anyway but he refused. OpenAI announced they would also not claim the prize.
Looks like no one wants this prize lol
The prize was offered to him in 2010, after multiple others had digested his work and published elsewhere.
Here’s what Terrence Tao had to say about it https://youtu.be/vuT-2_e4NHg
Edit to add: The fun part about the RH since people mentioned lean in a sibling thread is that in lean’s mathlib4 there is verified statement of the Riemann Hypothesis with a comment that says something like “instantiating an object of this type will lead to a prize of a million dollars”
I'm surprised perelman turned it down though. Seems straightforward enough to offer half of it to the other guy if you feel strongly about it.
Looks like even a blog post is good enough, they just need to do the review by themselves.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20000622023328/http://www.clayma...
> The rules governing the prizes describe the process for evaluating what has been achieved and for assigning credit. The process is deliberately unhurried, but we will provide updates.
I think “you don’t get anything straight away for rushing your AI into the maths problems, not even credit” aligns pretty fairly with what the fields medalists are concerned with.
Yes, but it took far less than using your meat brain to prove the Navier-Stokes Clay problem.
OpenAI and Anthropic might have 3 millennium problems by December
OpenAI needs to solve another to shut down the (baseless) plagiarism allegations. Anthropic wants blood because OpenAI sniped the last one from one of Anthropic's researchers.
It's a matter of pride for both companies. More results will come out soon.
However, after reading the open letter signed by 25 Fields Medalists, I became quite concerned. It feels like the mathematical world is changing very rapidly, almost overnight.
I used to think that before AI, you could spend your entire lifetime working on some of the hardest problems in mathematics. If you were an introvert or someone who enjoyed solitude, all you really needed was a pencil, some paper, and an eraser. You could spend years thinking about a problem, and if you were lucky enough to make a breakthrough, it would be your own journey.
Now AI is changing that. I wonder what this means for the kind of mathematics that people have traditionally done.
Mathematics has given us so many stories of lonely geniuses and their passions, people like Andrew Wiles, Grigori Perelman, and Yitang Zhang. Their stories are interesting because they show how deeply personal mathematics can be. They spent years working on problems because they were genuinely interested in them.
I am worried that we might slowly lose some of that side of mathematics as AI becomes more powerful. I do not think change is necessarily bad, but I think it is worth thinking about what mathematics should be in the future and whether it can still remain a deeply personal pursuit of curiosity and understanding.
I hope that pure mathematics research can retain a strongly human component forever. It would sadden me immensely for human understanding of our mathematical world to wither and die, and for us to become ignorant consumers of wonders beyond our understanding just because our robots can do it better than we can. As far as applied research goes, I hope we will always be able to understand what we want to, but I have less qualms about becoming more scalable and efficient.
all this fantasy books with magic artifacts should have mentally prepared us. Time to study the prompts Potter was giving to his magic wand.
After all, one of the main work the top AI companies are doing rigth now is developing AI to further develop AI. After several layers of AI developing AI we probably wouldn't be able to understand much there.
Currently 0/2 Millenium problem solvers claimed the prize money so clearly money is not their motivation for tackling the problem.
Openai is bringing machine gun to competition that used only knife and pistol.
OpenAI spent many multiples of the prize money in just a few days to get there and even if one solves a problem in the traditional way, that person is most likely already an accomplished professor at a reputable university where a million dollars doesn't mean as much as the eternal fame that comes with it.
It is a large prize if you're just an academic.
If AI can do superhuman math that allows better medicines, cleaner energy etc that is great. But if AI replaces humans in all the creative and intellectual fields that is not only a loss of jobs but also a loss of deeply meaningful activities. This is waved away but I think that is mistaken.
What I fear is really the growing notion that "people shouldn't do math/art/music because machine do it better and cheaper".
Yes, you can make problems arbitrarily complex. But the prize problems were chosen not just because the solutions appear likely to be very complex (the problem statements aren't necessarily inherently complex--there is a way to restate the Riemann hypothesis that a junior high school student could easily understand, which I'll give below).
They were chosen because they were important problems that mathematicians really wanted solved, top people had worked on them for a long time and progress stalled a long time ago, and it seemed likely that solving them would require major breakthroughs.
Those kind of problems can be discouraging. Enough people who are probably better than you have spent enough time failing to solve them that realistically most researchers are going to focus all their efforts on something they are likely to make progress on.
A nice prize can get more people to at least work on them as side projects.
Here's that restatement of the Riemann hypothesis I mentioned.
The Riemann hypothesis is that the non-trivial zeros of the function ζ(s) occur on the line 1/2 + yi.
ζ(s) is 1/1^s + 1/2^2 + 1/3^s + ... when s is a complex number whose real part is greater than 1, and defined everywhere else except s = 1 by a process called analytic continuation. The trivial zeros are at s = -2, -4, -6, ... .
For a mathematician, or a non-mathematician who has taken complex analysis and hasn't forgotten much of that, that is not too complex a definition. For anyone else the first reaction is probably "Trivial zeros? How the heck does that thing even have zeros? And if it does how the heck can it have zeros at any negative integers! It is obviously infinity at every negative integer!!!".
Here's a different hypothesis that turns out to be exactly equivalent to the Riemann hypothesis. They are either both true of both false, so resolving one of them resolves the other.
Let H(n) = 1 + 1/2 + ... + 1/n for all positive integers n. These are called the harmonic numbers.
Let S(n) = the sum of the positive integer factors of n for all positive integers n. For example S(4) = 1 + 2 + 4, S(6) = 1 + 2 + 3 + 6, and S(17) = 1 + 17.
Hypothesis: S(n) <= H(n) + exp(H(n)) log(H(n)) with equality only when n = 1.
The proof that this is equivalent to the Riemann hypothesis is here [1].
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0008177
...
>Now AI is changing that. I wonder what this means for the kind of mathematics that people have traditionally done.
Mathematics becomes engineering. I think it is great and long overdue. Saying that as a Math PhD dropout :) Of course like manual craftsmen had to adapt to Industrial Revolution, the same would need to be done by the mathematicians. And other scientists too.
Clearly the real-world cannot "blow-up" - real-world water vortices do not reach infinite velocity, etc.
The point of having Navier-Stokes as a Millennium prize was to hopefully generate new mathematics and techniques along the way, and auto-generating a sprawling AI-slop proof or millions of lines of Lean does not accomplish that result.
Clearly OpenAI has no interest in the math itself - to them this was just a trophy animal to shoot and stuff. I would be very surprised if they now helped analyze the proof and try to extract the mathematical value out of it, and this would obviously require outside help who are probably not inclined to help OpenAI math-wash their behavior.
I try not to go down the route of “hn was better before!” but… jeez, do better, people. What happened to this community, there used to be some effort to not be bottom-barrel like this.
- "yeah we know"
- "looking into it"
- "will ping you"
- "might take a while though"
+ preemptive linguistic cushioning in case they feel socially (politically) compelled enough to forbid clanker proofs in their solution acceptance criteria, or in case they decide against conceding to such pressuring
At this point, how can we tell whether AI is improving or it's just reappropriating its users work? It's probably a bit of both. But still, thick milky.
OpenAI's proof is substantially different and I don't think anyone has claimed otherwise. The accusation is that they used the same avenue of attack, and it's an uncommon one, and that makes it suspicious that they may have taken the idea.
They did not do it for the money obviously, but for the PR, that much everyone must agree on.
https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9404236
Aren't they already using computers, mobiles, calculators, etc. already?
DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 scores 89% and costs $0.02 per task.
If we apply the same factor to the guesstimated API price of $20M for this problem, we arrive at $57.
Real cost is a fraction of the API price. Although the internal model might have a higher API price than the ~$19.5M I estimated based on Astra's pricing.