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).
This is a sci-fi trope with no practical or realistic grounding. To "run", the AI needs vast banks of interconnected GPUs. These are pretty easy to spot and don't fit into anyone's pocket.
Because there is no internal feedback loop. There is no internal process gathering information from the external world and using it to modify its future behaviour. There is only the beginning of the calculation and then the end.
A genuine question, presuming no correct answer: what is to be done about it? China is reportedly on track to run more than 50% of global manufacturing by 2030, if the World Bank is correct. What would you do to act against this? Is doing nothing acceptable?
Start by realising this is going to take decades to reverse.
Given the timescale any solution will require cooperation across political parties. You can’t start something that will get undone in four years.
Then accept it won’t make much difference to the inhabitants of bumfuck USA. Automation is what took their jobs.
Start at the top of the food chain and gradually work down. If America can make cars but not car tyres then implement gradually increasing tariffs on imported tyres. 1% this year, 2% next and so on. Pretty soon you have a car tyre industry again.
Know when to stop, just like it doesn’t make sense for a banker to clean their own house it doesn’t make sense for a rich country to be making tee shirts.
Of course this won’t happen because of the American political system.
Tyres were just an example I plucked out of my arse, I wasn't suggesting they were important.
>They’re an environmental nightmare and very, very thin margins.
Which is an argument for consuming less tyres. It doesn't really have much to do with where you make them other than perhaps it is better to make them in a country with stronger environmental regulations.
I would act against China - because China is making political moves that I do not like. (they are supporting Russia in Ukraine, they are building up to invade Taiwan, they are supporting terror in the middle east...)
By acting against China that means I applaud moving manufacturing to Vietnam. I want to help Botswana grow - and I wish there were more countries in Africa I could name that seem to be on a good path (I cannot name the majority of countries in Africa, the ones I can are because they are in the news for bad things happening. I'm not even sure Botswana - I mostly know about them because last time I brought up Africa someone from there said their country was an exception).
Overall the world is better off with a lot of trade. Comparative advantage is real. There are things I can do that I don't want to become good at. However we also need to be aware that not everyone in the world is the friend of freedom and some must be cut off lest they grow. Nobody is perfect though, so you can't cut off everyone.
There are plenty of countries in East Africa ripe for this, unfortunately China is beating us there, too. Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania ... all are pretty well positioned right now for development, but rn China is mostly the one doing it.
(Source - worked in int'l remittances w/ African receiving countries)
africa has constantly been exploited by those who offer money with a catch. China is investing a lot but those investments tend to come with a catch they are better off without long term.
By acting against China that means I applaud moving manufacturing to Vietnam
and
last time I brought up Africa someone from there said their country was an exception
Making what are essentially strategic decisions in this "shoot from the hip" fashion is what lands us repeatedly in these situations. By way of illustration, let me try one from the 1980's out on you:
"By acting against Iran that means I applaud men like Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden"
(In fairness to the americans who made that colossal blunder, I'll assume that, to them, it seemed a good idea at the time. They were simply not long term thinkers. So no one ever asked, "Hmm, what comes next though?")
We, as a people, need to start thinking a bit further ahead than the ends of our noses.
What would prevent Vietnam or Botswana do make political moves 20 years down the line? Surely it is not their economic reliance on you, as China clearly demonstrates.
I see exactly zero point in repeating the example of China again. Why would the outcome be different? Vietnam is another Communist pseudo-dictatorship. Why is this one so different that it won't support Russia?
Vietnam is making moves in directions I want to encourage. Only God knows the future and he isn't talking. (there are some who will disagree with various parts of that statement, but they have offered no evidence that they get useful information on the future.
Vietnam has been at war with China in the recent past. Today China is claiming seas that the US and internal law both call Vietnam's territorial waters - though currently they are not at war. Thus even if Vietnam doesn't move in a good direction, just keeping them where they are (as opposed to supporting China) is useful if only because all indications today are China will start a war in the future. (again nobody knows if they will, but they are preparing as if they will)
Nothing prevents anyone from making moves 20 years from now that are bad. All we can do today is encourage those who seem to be moving for the better. We have no clue how things will turn out. Even when we make what in hindsight now looks like a bad decision, we have no idea how it would have been if we had done something different.
>Vietnam is making moves in directions I want to encourage.
Just like China did? They had a whole phase of economic liberalization and opening trade.
>Nothing prevents anyone from making moves 20 years from now that are bad.
Vietnam is literally another communist pseudo-dictatorship. Their place in the world is obviously far more ambiguous than that of e.g. England. The idea of shifting manufacturing to Vietnam because you do not like the positions of China is just absurd.
>All we can do today is encourage those who seem to be moving for the better.
Why should the US not focus on supporting long term allies who aren't communist single party states?
20 years ago China looked to be going in the right direction. However things change. If they get rid of their dictator I might again support them - depending of course on how they change.
we should of course support most of europe which usualy has better government. Likewise the other countries in America - both north and south. And so on for anywhere else we can find friends. I an not a Trump fan even if once in a while he does something I support
>So their ecconomy grows and with it edutated people who can afford to see the world and in turn how thep have been lied to.
As has happened with China? When they opened up trade and became part of a global economy their nationalistic ambitions stopped and they ceased to support dictatorships like Russia. Also their political system opened up and they morphed from a uniparty communist country to a liberal democracy. Oh wait, the exact opposite happened on all accounts.
You didn't answer my question. Why would Vietnam be any different? Why should the US help build their economy so that they can do the exact same thing as China did. Your theory of how this works is disproven by reality. You can not make a country a liberal democracy by opening up trade with them. It failed with China, it failed with Russia.
The irony is that China was actually against Russia into the 90s (Sino Soviet split was still on), and nationalism was taboo also because too many people were burned by the cultural revolution. Changes were made after 1989 to encourage more nationalism, and that all culminates with Xi (China and Russia are still frenemies, but mutual antagonism with the USA has brought them closer).
> You can not make a country a liberal democracy by opening up trade with them. It failed with China, it failed with Russia.
It worked with South Korea, and Taiwan. (Japan and Germany, but they were on the losing side of a war with us which is a confounding factor). It is by no means perfect, but I've yet to see anyone suggest something else that has any chance of working.
Yeah, there's no painless answer. China is not a democracy. They can force millions of people to endure terrible working conditions, pollution, corruption, and abuse, and take a very long view. The US can't do this.
Bloc building. Europe has countries which do lots of manufacturing. Use those to gradually reduce reliance on China by slowly restricting Chinese access to the Bloc market and build up supply chains inside the Bloc.
Making everything in the US can not be done without a very severe decline in living standards.
Under normal circumstances, when a country is running a massive surplus, their currency should appreciate, weakening their exports and thus recalibrating trade balance back to zero. That isn't happening right now, because China (and other surplus nations like Germany and Japan) relies on buying massive amounts of US treasuries to weaken the Yuan. That's one of the reasons why the US dollar is the reserve currency. It has to be, because only the US has an economy large enough to provide high-yield, low-risk treasuries and is willing to do so.
Trump's tariffs would theoretically rebalance trade on the long term, albeit in a highly destructive manner. But the more diplomatic solutions as proposed by other commentators like Catherine Tai, Yanis Varoufakis or Michael Pettis would be the introduction of capital controls to stem the demand for US treasuries, or better, the reintroduction of Keynes' proposal of the International Clearing Union back in 1945. The ICU's role would be to actively balance global trade surpluses via the international currency bancor, of which would have fixed control of FX rates rather than relying on FX markets to punish surplus nations and help deficit nations respectively. As for nations outside the Union, they would just get treated similar to the USSR.
I think they should want to do something - it's just that torpedoing your ties with your closest allies and trade partners then lighting the stock market on fire is maybe not that thing. China spent decades building up their supply chains, infrastructure and manufacturing capacity and had support for this at state level.
If the US sees it as a threat and wants to do something it should maybe look to what China has done. Because tbh what Trump did re Tariffs is pretty close to "nothing" all things considered.
They won't though because as soon as you have someone saying "look, let's just put together a staged plan so that in, say, five years we'll produce X% more electronics domestically..." you'll have a Republican shrieking about "five year plans" and how the USA is becoming communist
A great analyst once taught me the response question: "yes, and so what?" What's so magic about manufacturing as opposed to all the higher value work of the US economy? Have people not noticed that the average American is still richer than the average Chinese person by a long way, and (yes, painfully) more so than the average European?
If you're going to talk wars, then .. US military manufacturing is still the world leader yet again. Plus the nukes.
Here is a what: there are a lot of Americans (and similar for Europe) who did not go to college, and their kids are not going to college. Of they went to college but got a degree that doesn't have good job prospects. These people would be better off with manufacturing jobs than what they can find. This is probably a minority, but it is a large enough minority to swing elections and thus important.
A lot of the war stuff gets framed in very odd terms. If you want a local defence industry then pay for it. Enforce component sovereignty requirements... Which everyone already does. Then actually react to reports which call out the gaps and pay to close them.
This bizzare "we'll bring back manufacturing and be ready all the time" thing seems to imagine you'll just turn the local widget maker over to knocking out high temperature stealth composites for hypersonic missiles real quick.
Which is of course the story of a lot of American manufacturing: it's hard to get a hobby run of PCBs because all the PCB makers are optimized for large orders for defence procurement (and the clearance, supply line and stuff requirements that brings).
