r/BetterOffline • u/r77anderson • 7h ago
OpenAI may be attempting to steal a mathematician’s solution to a Millennium Prize problem
https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf•
u/r77anderson 7h ago
The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”
The people over at OpenAI are so charming!
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u/Frank_White32 1h ago
What’s the actual difference between hyper scalers and organized crime?
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u/Additional-Staff-326 34m ago
Hyperscalers started out with a purpose and a legit business model for the cloud. Companies needed servers regardless of if the subscription model is enticing so those would have existed. AI companies started out with a novel chatbot that has mostly only grown by taking what people built on top of it and stealing that.
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u/Local_Recording_2654 7h ago
I hope this story gets the media coverage it deserves. This is absolutely crazy of them to do.
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u/Y0uCanTellItsAnAspen 5h ago
If the full version of the implication is actually true “OpenAI learned that mathematicians made a major breakthrough and then went through their chat history in order to beat them and make the breakthrough first” then I would go so far as to say openAI is done as a company.
Their stock valuation is entirely reliant on businesses with cutting edge IP that need frontier models like Astra. It companies think that OpenAI might steal that data and then COMPETE with them using it - every company will run away like the plague.
Microsoft/google/Apple/Dropbox have all held tons of extremely valuable IP for decades on mail servers and backups — there’s a reason none of them have ever even gave the appearance of touching it.
There is, of course, an if at the top of this — it could be a coincidence - but the mere implication is a PR nightmare.
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u/DragonflyOk9274 3h ago
Figma had to learn the lesson that hard way:
https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/comments/1ss1kws/anthropic_going_after_figmas_business/
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u/Live_Fall3452 5h ago
Eh. Most companies are too short-sighted to care. People kept selling stuff on Amazon and kept using AWS even after Amazon took data from sellers and used it to make competing products.
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u/Y0uCanTellItsAnAspen 4h ago
Very different - Amazons clients are the individuals who buy products on Amazon, not the companies who sell there. The fact that the buyers are all on Amazon is the reason companies sell on Amazon — it has always been a bad deal for the sellers (compared to, for example, selling on their own websites).
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u/falken_1983 4h ago
Amazon considers the sellers to be their main customers, but the whole arrangement is kind of complicated. Cory Doctorow has a good breakdown of how it works in Enshittification
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u/PassageNo 5m ago
It's also thoroughly kills the idea that AI generation counts as fair use. It's the most damning evidence of them flat out stealing other people's work wholesale so they can compete against the very people they stole it from. The current lawsuits are going to have a field day with this.
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u/Designer_Respect4285 16m ago
Except even the guy who they allegedly stole the idea from credits chat GPT with helping him solve the problem. He called it a "deep blue Kasparov moment". He also only solved a simplified version of the problem, if the proof is valid, Open AI solved the actual problem.
If true, they would hardly be "done as a company" the value of that kind of contribution to math could be almost incalculable. The entire information economy is possible because of breakthroughs in math. We wouldn't be having this conversation on the internet without breakthroughs in math.
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u/OwnYourChildren 7h ago
I kinda wonder whether the intelligence agencies may not want something like this being publicized. Again, I think people have a major blind spot for how these companies are likely being used by intelligence for industrial espionage, etc..
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u/LucasL-L 3h ago
There isnt much to cover here. Its just academic drama. If AI solved a Millenium problem that is big news.
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u/suboptimummenace 7h ago
Levent had been told by Sebastien “very little human input” had been used. This turned out not to be true.
basically every single "AI solved math/coding" is this
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5h ago
[deleted]
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u/sabinscabin 3h ago
he doesn't mean prior art, he means that the models were extensively babysat through the whole session. They didn't just set it and forget it.
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u/Holiday_Ad_8501 2h ago
even if it was “heavily babysat” this is still an insane moment if it really is true that is has been solved.
I think one of the big fears with llms is that its actually a dead end in the end to agi/asi.
If this actually is and the problem has been vibes solved its insane
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u/floodyberry 6h ago
"Additionally if there is anything in terms of compute from OpenAI’s end we would be happy to provide it"
...
Over the course of the call, as members of their team sent Sebastien corrections and details over their internal chat, it emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem, that this was one of a number of things that was tried, that work had started on the unforced problem, that the team first set the model on easier problems, including Euler, that even the prompt that had been shown to me had been written by prompting Codex, and that an insane amount of compute had been used.
i wonder why the global theft machines have infinite resources to throw at anything that might be used as hype for the global theft machines. it's almost like they think they can't survive on their own, and hype driven outside funding is the only way to keep going
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u/Easy_Tie_9380 7h ago
Wow OpenAI and Anthropic are so fucked. They need to make a trillion dollars but even this “big news” is only worth tens of billions at most.
Edit: and they’re giving it away for free!
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u/falken_1983 6h ago
This big news is not worth tens of billions. An actual solution to this particular problem has almost no practical value - it is purely a mathematical curiosity - the value all comes form marketing.
Being able to say that they solved a Millennium problem is is going to be huge for them, but it is hard to put a dollar value on that. Most people don't have a clue what a Millennium problem is in the first place, so it's not something that you can just stick on a billboard and then see an immediate boost in sales.
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u/lolitsbigmic 6h ago
This is my general issue with ai application in mathematics is that there is not a lot of application if at all for these solutions. So its not worth it a lot of mathematician to work on it. At the end of the day they need funding like any other academic and there more important problems to solve. Like finding entirely new model for fluid flow thats better than naiver stokes, than proving the limits is real or not when our approximation work very well and know when it breaks.
The only positive with ai for mathematics is that its underfunded field so they can't get enough money to have access computational power. Now they do. So silver linings in that regards. Just not economically which is ed's thesis anyway.
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u/falken_1983 5h ago edited 5h ago
I did an undergrad in maths 20 years ago and haven't looked at it since, so my views are probably really out of date, but access to computational power is not usually that big a deal for mathematicians. In fact they are often very distrustful of anything that is dependent on crunching a lot of numbers.
Take the 4-Colour Theorem for example. That was "solved" in the 1970s, but no one accepted the proof because it consisted of hundreds of pages of computer-generated equations. Even after the proof was generally accepted, there was another 20-ish years where people were publishing results where they simplified the proof and removed some aspect of the reliance on computers.
I'm not really familiar with the Navier Stokes Existence and Smoothness problem, but my understanding is that the research has reached that stage were is is becoming feasible start attacking it by checking a lot of special cases, with a little bit of guidance which AI might be able to provide.1 This is not typical of mathematics in general.
[1] At least that was my understanding before I saw OP. I don't know what to think now.
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u/lolitsbigmic 4h ago
Thanks for this, my research career ages ago is in biological engineering so a lot more applied and need computation to complete numerical solutions but its baby stuff in comparison.
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u/invisible_shrek 6h ago
So do I understand correctly that OAI very likely stole this guys sessions and convos he used to help him work on a problem after they heard what he was doing.
The stolen logs already contained the proof/solution or something of that nature, which OAI then fed into an LLM to produce an even more sloppified version of the results and is attempting to claim authorship?
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u/DeepGas4538 1h ago
I wonder how many other mathematicians this has happened to
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u/invisible_shrek 1h ago
I wonder if that’s how the AI “solved” the previous couple problems they were bragging about.
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u/Acceptable_Yam_7745 5h ago
I mean, did people relly take them at their word that they wouldn't snoop on the chats of their paying customers? I'm sure they've stolen plenty of IP from their enterprise customers and we might get some hard proof one day...
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u/makersfark 3h ago
So OpenAI has spent billions of dollars to steal an answer from mathematicians to solve a problem that was (checks notes) one of a couple meant to encourage public interest in mathematics back in 2000 with a prize of a million dollars.
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u/Timely_Speed_4474 7h ago
This is more marketing FUD from OpenAI and Anthropic. Stochastic parrots cannot solve millennium prize problems.
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u/DreamlessWindow 7h ago
They can, because they are kind of brute forcing the problem. Lean allows them to use a hard-coded verification to any proof submitted by the LLM. So, the LLM spouts some bullshit, they use Lean to verify if it's valid, and if it isn't, you generate a new prompt to the LLM with information about where it went wrong. This whole thing is automated after the initial prompt.
If you have a billion LLMs running in paralel trying to solve a thousand different mathematical problems and spending a gazillion dollars of compute, eventually one will hit something that Lean confirms as valid. Just like if you buy every lottery ticket, you are bound to win.
Is this useful? Maybe, depends on what was solved. Is this efficient? Absolutely not. Is it a good use of anyone's time and money? Almost certainly not.
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u/Timely_Speed_4474 6h ago
A lean proof of the Euler blowup is going to be tens of thousands of lines. The search space for that is so large that there isn't enough time left in the universe to compute it.
Something much weirder is going on here. I think they are laundering the results of real mathematicians to feed their hype machine.
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u/DreamlessWindow 6h ago edited 6h ago
Not arguing against that. I expect the scummiest behavior from these companies. Just saying that some math problems are technically solvable by throwing trillions of dollars in compute at them, which I wouldn't be surprised to learn may include some millenium problems.
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u/Timely_Speed_4474 5h ago edited 5h ago
There are more valid 100k loc lean proofs than there are atoms in the universe raised to the power of atoms in the universe. The fact anyone could find literally anything using a brute force method would mean that we deeply misunderstand what we're doing.
I think the ai labs are simply lying.
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u/DreamlessWindow 5h ago
That's why I said they are kind of brute forcing, it's an oversimplification of what's actually going on. The LLM outputs are not random, they are averages based on the training data. In other words, the output will be something that kind of looks the way it has to look at first glance based on millions of examples generated by actual mathematicians working on proofs. The possible outputs by an LLM given the given prompts are far less than the possible inputs you can give to Lean, so it won't go over every possibility.
You also have to keep in mind that they won't talk about the other million mathematical problems they failed to solve. It's like the birthday paradox. If you have a single problem being worked on by a million LLMs, you are likely going to get nothing. But if you have a thousand problems being worked on by a thousand LLMs each, the chances of one hitting something at some point are fairly decent. If you only publish your success, you can sell the story about how amazing you LLM is at math, don't look at the other 999 unsolved problems where they wasted just as much money and resources as the one they did manage to solve.
But again, this is more about how they are getting any math results at all lately, and not about this particular instance.
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u/DapperCam 48m ago
I don’t think you need to brute force the entire solution space. We know things about these problems that can shrink the solution space. Or even if we don’t know for sure, mathematicians have an intuition about the “right place to look”. Then they do their brute force thing with those constraints which is a much more tractable problem (but still might come up with nothing).
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u/21epitaph 5h ago edited 3h ago
It's not obligated, but tbh it could definitely happen.
It's an industry wiith hundreds of billions in PR. Math researchers never received as much money as they are doing now.
They can also put dozens of mathematicians working on problems for which they never would have received any funding.
But yeah, they definitely could do some shit like this.
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u/baloobah 2h ago
For reference, world funding for "mathematics"(not applied, not engineering) is usually about 2 billion a year.
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u/invisible_shrek 6h ago
This is like monkeys, typewriters and Shakespear all over again…
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u/JetSetIlly 5h ago
More like, monkeys, typewriters and eventually one of them will write "Hey Hey we're the Monkees".
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u/No-Compote8355 4h ago
But it’s the only type of flashy achievement these labs can claim, since LLMs are only effective in formally verifiable tasks, such as coding (either the code compiles or it doesn’t) and mathematics (either Lean verifies the proof or it doesn’t).
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u/The-Menhir 1h ago
It's so stupid. The reason there's a bountry on these problems is because of the math you'll make in pursuit of a proof. What's the point of an LLM spitting out a zitronillian lines of intractable LEAN? Like Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem was a breakthrough in elliptic curves and modular forms. We can probably confidently say P≠NP, so what if it's verified but we learn nothing from the verification?
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u/Main-Company-5946 4h ago
Modeling human generated training data is just one way to train an ai and newer LLMs are specifically RL’d on math/coding which means they aren’t limited to training data, they also learn from trial and error.
So yes, they are really good at math and I wouldn’t be too surprised if they did solve a millennium prize problem
The issue as Terence Tao pointed out is that AI generated proofs are often extremely unreadable, and sometimes really really long(hundreds or thousands of pages). AI provides answers but it doesn’t provide understanding.
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u/Designer_Respect4285 1h ago edited 27m ago
The guy who solved a simplified version of the problem is saying AI was a major part of the breakthrough. He is not an employee of Open AI.
Terrance Tao also disagrees, he specifically identified Navier Stokes as a problem where AI could solve it or meaningfully contribute to the solution.
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u/taaare 1h ago
While I think that if these claims are true, OAI is clearly in some deep shit, LLMs are not just stochastic parrots anymore and anyone who uses them for any meaningful task knows this. I am NOT a fan of OpenAI or Anthropic, but think the underlying technology is incredible and have been following it since "attention" in 2017. The constant underselling of these models on Reddit irks me.
It has become clear that LLMs can and do reason about things, can create novel solutions, and even have forms of introspection. There have been numerous papers on these phenomena from sources outside the frontier labs (although Anthropic has some of the most noteworthy ones). Independant audits of things like the HuggingFace incident also trace agent behavior in swarms and make the "marketing" claim tough to justify.
All of that to say, I truly would not be shocked if a model independently solved a Millenium problem. Most people are severely underread on AI and truly do not see how far it has come and what it's capabilities are. I'll probably get downvoted for this, but people need to take modern AI more seriously than this.
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u/Dickasaurus_Rex_ 6h ago
it must be exhausting trying to hold onto this position
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u/Timely_Speed_4474 6h ago
Did I say the magic words to get attacked my OpenAI's bot army or something?
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u/Dickasaurus_Rex_ 6h ago
No you’re just objectively wrong LOL
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u/Timely_Speed_4474 6h ago
sigh yet another account with hidden post history.
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u/Dickasaurus_Rex_ 6h ago
Is that supposed to be a gotcha LOL
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u/fbueckert 1h ago
Surely you're capable of something more concrete than just, "You're just objectively wrong"?
Surely you can, y'know, prove that?
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u/blaaaaablubbbbbb 7h ago
RemindMe! 1 week
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u/Timely_Speed_4474 7h ago
Remind you of what? These slop factories admit to having a small armies of mathematicians working on the problem.
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u/Ok-Examination-2869 7h ago
You know nothing about maths if you think an army of mathematicians is anywhere near enough horsepower to prove Navier-Stokes.
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u/falken_1983 7h ago
The problem is close to being solved and according to the letter linked above, OpenAI do have a team of mathematicians working on getting it finished.
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u/Timely_Speed_4474 7h ago
The letter says it has already been solved. Not sure if I believe anyone involved here, but that's what Tristen is saying
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u/falken_1983 7h ago
It's not in a state where they are willing to publish it. It's not solved.
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u/Timely_Speed_4474 7h ago
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u/falken_1983 7h ago
I was just going by what was written in the letter, a document which has been posted here with no summary, no background info and no links to other documents that may be associated with it.
If you want to be a prick about it, the thing isn't solved until after the community accept that it is solved. Sometimes that can take years.
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u/Timely_Speed_4474 6h ago
The relevant section from the letter:
I was told that an internal OpenAI model had produced a proof of finite time blowup for the forced Navier-Stokes equations. When Levent asked by text for 2 the precise statement, the answer was: “Existence of forced blowup in R3 and T 3 ,” with “the forcing function is smooth option c and d in Fefferman.” I was told the proof is about 100 pages. I have not seen it.
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u/falken_1983 3h ago
Now that I have had a chance to look at this, it appears to be a partial solution. Buckmaster put out several papers along with the open letter, and together they are close to solving the Millennium Challenge, but I don' think they are quite there yet. He has another paper in the works that he says he is not ready to publish yet.
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u/ksjdragon 7h ago
"That's a nice proof you have there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it."
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u/Big_ifs 7h ago
Is this linked from anywhere else? I can't find this linked on the author's page (https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/). The document by itself would be more effective for media coverage if it had some more context about the author (there's only his first name in there) and about the time it was written.
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u/TinyAntOnABog 7h ago
I could find it here: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117233413705701198
Terence Tao linked to that post too, for context: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117233527638291447
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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 6h ago
For me it is out of question they steal and use whatever they can. This is all or nothing for them.
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u/TieConscious1955 3h ago
Does anyone need more proof that this industry needs to be regulated?
They say that they are not training their models on user data on paid plans, but who guarantees it?
Nobody audits these companies.
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u/lurkervidyaenjoyer 2h ago
Seems like this could be something, but given that this is an open memo meant for the community he's a part of, it's very dense in subject matter terminology and is very loose (likely for legal reasons) as to what it's actually claiming about OpenAI.
I do hope this reaches more known outlets that can clean up the presentation, and that whatever is being alleged can be investigated further. From the comments here and from reading the memo, I can't tell if OpenAI was literally handed the solution via chat logs and claiming they found it, or that they did solve it independently but with too much compute, or that they're claiming to have solved it first when they had instead solved it after these guys did, or something else entirely.
The memo also includes enough LLM-glazing in the preamble that it will be trivial for more booster-minded people, outlets, reporters, etc, to dismiss this outright.
with a great deal of help from LLMs
I had planned to say on announcing our work that the results are not the important thing. Rather the important thing is instead the significance that a mathematician and an LLM model can now do all this work in a month. The significance of this with respect to the way we train students, assign credit, referee, and decide what is worth one human life’s attention cannot be understated. This is a a Deep Blue-Kasparov moment
Anyone sufficiently AI-pilled will metaphorically ejaculate at reading this part and not make a serious effort at trying to parse out the rest of it.
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u/LaGigs 2h ago
I'm a mathematician, though I stopped after phd but I still read the arxiv and graduate books that I wanted to learn. I am also resolutely anti-ai for economics reasons and because of all the bs we see everyday.
However I have to say this summer has been tough for my discipline. It's clear that the future of math is going to look like a constant partnership with AI and we are going to be inundated by huge papers every single day.
This paper, which isn't in my field so I can't even read it, is ~100 pages long. I think people must realise that 100 pages of math is not like 100 pages of a novel. It takes weeks to fully absorb such works.
This is why so many of these results are also autoformalised into the Lean language, which is a deterministic program that checks the argument. If I were still in the field I'd really start learning Lean seriously because rn I'm having trouble trusting anything I read on the arxiv.
Sorry for the rant. It's a weird time to be a math person.
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u/21epitaph 5h ago
Mathematicians ready to fuck up their whole fields's future just for their exciting little toy.
Meh
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u/Main-Company-5946 4h ago
Nothing exciting about it. AI only provides answers, it doesn’t provide understanding. It takes the incentive away to develop understanding which is a terrible thing for the field of mathematics
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u/Designer_Respect4285 29m ago
The mathematician himself also used chat GPT to come up with the solution to the simplified version of the problem. He called this a Deep Blue Kasparov moment so even he is saying AI made an incredible contribution to the problem.
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u/appellant 20m ago
I flip flop between ai is great to is it all smokes and mirror. I am not really surprised with these companies acting like this.
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u/Saith1234 7h ago
You should maybe add a summary of the text to your post. This is very worrying.
While this is not a proof, but this text hints that OpenAI is logging the prompts of scientists and when they get the hint of someone being close to a breakthrough, apply a whole team (mathematicians in this case) and "steal" the prompts and attempt to solve it themself.
Just so they can boast about it, to stay ahead of anthropic in the public perception.