OpenAI's AI math breakthrough sparks controversy over priority and hype

The core section:

> However, communications quickly became contentious. According to Buckmaster, OpenAI offered to give him sole authorship on the Navier-Stokes solution—but only if Alpöge’s name was removed from the work and if the write-up would acknowledge the problem had been resolved by an internal OpenAI model. Buckmaster refused, in part because he was troubled by the question of what OpenAI's system had actually seen. For example, Buckmaster said the company did not initially give him a clear answer about whether its agents had access to the pair's logs on Codex (which is an OpenAI product).

> OpenAI executives have denied that any employee or AI agent saw the pair’s work before the researchers released it publicly on 7 September. But there still remains a separate question: Could the pair's work have reached OpenAI's models through its training data?

> OpenAI’s blog announcing the Navier-Stokes solution does not dismiss the possibility: “While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from [Buckmaster and Alpöge’s] usage of our products helped improve our models .”

I think it was a pretty questionable thing to do by trying to front-run these researchers even if they didn’t make use of their techniques. The fact that they may have inadvertently “borrowed” their work via training data makes it much worse.

OpenAI’s behavior here — even if you only consider [their] side of the story — was (at best) in bad taste.

The whole thing reeks of the desperation of an unprofitable venture-backed startup looking for its next PR win to keep the wind in the sails.

But I think what’s being overlooked in the race to claim absolute credit is that both sides ultimately relied on a LLM (and one of OpenAI’s at that). Either a human researcher made a breakthrough discovery with the help of Codex, or the latest GPT model made a breakthrough with the help of human training data, or a little of both… either way it is undeniable that LLMs have quickly become an integral part of R&D workflows and are accelerating research.

This would be a major win for any normal company. You could even build a bigger collaboration with this guy, give him a big budget and push for extensions to this preliminary result, and in return do a write up on how he uses your model in his workflow. Huge PR win. What this says to me is that their valuation is so astronomical that they feel the only way to justify it is to demonstrate a fully autonomous discovery bot… which it simply is not.

> “I certainly don't expect the industry to continue to spend millions of dollars to solve problems in mathematics, because there is no profit in it,” Columbia University mathematician Michael Harris wrote in an email to Science. But he worries the highly publicized achievement will be “extremely damaging to mathematics; it convinces decision makers that human mathematicians are obsolete, and it convinces young people that their passion for mathematics has no future.”

LLMs seem particularly suited toward these existence-proof problems. Working mathematicians seem absolutely essential for universally quantified results, still. I strongly doubt, for example, that if Fermat's Last Theorem hadn't been proven three decades ago, that an LLM would be able to do work equivalent to inventing the mathematics as Andrew Wiles did to solve the problem. I have similar doubts about P vs NP, the twin prime conjecture, even the Riemann Hypothesis (unless the latter has at least one counterexample).

And I want to be clear: I'm not downplaying the achievements of these models. This is remarkable! I simply think that the pattern of success is in existence proofs or finding counterexamples, which makes sense based on how LLMs function and are trained.

Extensive discussion on OpenAI's blog post on Navier-Stokes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613262 .

Quanta Magazine article that also discusses some of the controversy: https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-has-solved-one-of-maths-1-...

Regardless of the end result, OpenAI's behavior would be a career-ending ethics scandal for a human mathematician. This bit alone would be a career-ender.

> According to Buckmaster, OpenAI offered to give him sole authorship on the Navier-Stokes solution—but only if Alpöge’s name was removed from the work and if the write-up would acknowledge the problem had been resolved by an internal OpenAI model.

I wonder if an appropriate response from the mathematical community would be a good old-fashioned shunning. Mathematicians are allowed to use OpenAI's tools as much as they want, but no one with any current or prior OpenAI affiliation gets published in a reputable journal, ever.

FYI: The problem at hand is an existence problem. No real construction of any real formula for the solution is provided, only a singular perturbation expansion.

In short: The problem is about whether a solution (of the NS Equations with external driving force) can be found that blows up in finite time. i.e. exhibits infinite velocity at a point even for a viscous flow.

The solution: Take a circular curl ansatz which shrinks in xy-direction and elongates in z-direction and see whether you can find linearized waves so that these waves show a blow up when propagated on the curl. Then prove that the higher orders of the perturbation are regular before the T0 singularity time and you have solved the problem. The external force is just the remainder of the NS-Equation right hand side.

It is a lot of tedious formula juggling of all the higher orders and some singular perturbation expansions. Perfectly suited for algebra systems. OpenAI was using probably python sympy for the formula work and the researchers had to guide the LLM what to do in higher mathematical language.

Here is the paper:

https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/32d9f210-8b73-45e0-91bc-82a30aef8...

when you upload it to chatgpt astra can explain what they do and why it works, have fun.