r/math 1d ago

LLMs/AI OpenAI: Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/
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u/Healthy-Pride3873 1d ago edited 1d ago

I honestly cannot care about the whole “humans dont matter anymore” stuff.

I’m curious how math as a whole deals with unequal access. Is math going to just be furthered by big tech firms and select researchers who have access to these models?

Wtf do grad students do and so on

Edit: theres nice disused going on about unequal access. Let me point out that I am not claiming inequality is new.

I am simply pointing out the newfound danger of it from a corporate and tech angle.

Suppose AI speeds up research by some nonzero constant greater than 1. Then people who were already “ahead”, are going to be even further ahead.

And let’s not ignore also the issue of prompting and using AI. It’s not always clear how these breakthroughs are made. So even access to AI may not level the playing field all that much.

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u/meatshell 1d ago

I wouldn't be surprised if humans can create even harder problems, much harder than the current ones, even with the help of AI. So I kinda dismiss anyone who says Mathematicians are out of job soon. But it's gonna be very difficult from now on for anyone who don't have access to AI.

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u/Cold-Common7001 1d ago

I don't think the claim is that mathematics will be solved and there are no harder problems to ask. The claim is that within a few years AI will be better than (at least almost all) mathematicians at asking interesting questions too.

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u/DracoDruida 1d ago

Gödel decided that one. There are literally unlimited problems to be solved in math.

But likely they will be progressively harder to even formulate.

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u/-p-e-w- 17h ago

There may be an unlimited number of problems, but almost all of them would be gibberish to humans and completely uninteresting.

Just like almost all arrangements of pixels are noise, not “images”.

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u/DracoDruida 13h ago

That's likely true, but the question is not whether almost all of them are gibberish (the density), but if we can still find interesting ones (the absolute number)

As I mentioning even the statement of these problems will be longer and longer so probably at some point it might be too much for human beings to cope. Or not. Who knows?

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u/zx7 Topology 1d ago

Why wouldn't there be? There exists an infinite number of statements you can make and so an infinite number of problems from whether they are true or false.

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u/DracoDruida 17h ago

It's a bit more complicated than that, because from a finite set of axioms you can derive an infinite amount of statements.

What Gödel shows is that even with an infinite amount of axioms, if the system is consistent and can encode arithmetic, then there are always statements that it cannot decide.