I'm sorry but I'm not sure I understand your argument. I think you're saying I'm comparing apples to oranges. I'm not: I'm comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges. These are two different questions:
>> But how much time have human brains spent working on the problem in either of those time periods? How many mathematicians have worked on the problem? 10k?
So neither 10k humans worked on Navier-Stokes, nor has any human spent a century of non-stop work on it.
But I could have made the point more clear maybe.
>> I don't, of course, disagree that it's possible for an AI company to put a lot of AI agents to work on a problem, but I'm not sure how that makes what they can do less impressive. The fact that you can do that has always been a major part of why AI could be such a big deal. "A country of geniuses in a datacentre" is the kind of thing people have said; we aren't quite there yet, but the "country" part is as important as the "geniuses" part.
>> But how much time have human brains spent working on the problem in either of those time periods? How many mathematicians have worked on the problem? 10k?
So neither 10k humans worked on Navier-Stokes, nor has any human spent a century of non-stop work on it.
But I could have made the point more clear maybe.
>> I don't, of course, disagree that it's possible for an AI company to put a lot of AI agents to work on a problem, but I'm not sure how that makes what they can do less impressive. The fact that you can do that has always been a major part of why AI could be such a big deal. "A country of geniuses in a datacentre" is the kind of thing people have said; we aren't quite there yet, but the "country" part is as important as the "geniuses" part.
Yes, I see your point, but those are not geniuses. Grigori Perelman proved the Poincaré conjecture alone, though as he has emphasised his work was based on advances made by others, particularly Richard S. Hamilton. That we can call a genius: a single man who solves one of the most interesting problems in all of mathematics building on the work of his predecessors. 10k agents that search blindly and find a result by luck (or by stealing it), I don't agree we can call "genius". That's what I call "brute force". Anyone who wants to call OpenAI's agents "a country of geniuses" has first to deal with the fact that they look a lot like monkeys on typewriters.