These mathematicians’ prompts are not like “hey chat, please solve Navier-Stokes for me”. They add real expertise and intuition from the cutting edge of their field.
Recklessly prompting OpenAI without a care to the safety of their knowledge.
And after that trying to cast aspersions at OpenAI?
Hopefully we get some better facts, because OpenAI are disliked enough that a smear campaign could work against them.
Edit: also the narritive is getting framed as OpenAI versus Anthropic. A highly political extremely capitalist fight is going on, and facts are victims.
If the new model is that good, and is chewing through open problems at an unprecedented rate, the smart move would have been to let the humans have their W on this one and present solutions to those other problems.
Especially if there really is a long list of them.
"Here are a few hundred proofs" is far more convincing than "We really Navier Stokes and coincidentally someone else did too but we don't know the details or anything, who us, definitely not."
It's a PR fiasco, and a cynic might wonder if it's entirely about the IPO.
I'm consistently entertained by how these companies, with the most advanced models on the planet, consistently do the most idiotic things.
It seems a perfectly reasonable possibility that Navier-Stokes is just the most easily solvable of the remaining problems, and that their new model is capable of solving it while not being capable of solving the others.
There's many cases of researchers racing to solve various problems after hearing that others are working on them. I don't think anyone's suggesting that it was a coincidence at all. In fact, OpenAI freely admits that they started working on the problem after hearing rumours that others were close to solving it. To me, that's not evidence of "cheating" in any way.
Is it really such an extraordinary claim to say that they could have solved the problem without copying Buckmaster and Alpoge? It seems very much in the realm of possibilities.
To me, it seems just as extraordinary to claim that they did "cheat". If I were a betting man, I would put the odds around 50/50 from everything I've read on the subject.
But my point is that everyone seems to be presuming guilt.
It is an extraordinary claim, it is a millenium prize problem after all. We don't even know, even if there was no copying, how much human involvement there was in the result.
1. OpenAI couldn't have solved the problem without the researchers' private data for training.
2. OpenAI models can solve math problems