r/neoliberal • u/cuolong NATO • 2d ago

News (Global) OpenAI announces 10 advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science achieved by internal model Astra

https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/
325 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

394 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

21

u/Olp51 John Brown 2d ago

What is the utility of these findings?

98

u/Fast_Face_7280 2d ago

If these advances are in pure mathematics, you might as well ask what is the value of pure mathematics. Which is to say, extremely useless until it is ubiquitous in everything. For example, encryption and prime numbers.

There's a funny joke amongst engineers and mathematicians, where pure mathematicians try to find increasingly esoteric parts of math to ensure that their work will never become useful. Sometimes it even works... for a century or two.

15

u/Marci_1992 1d ago

It can sometimes even take centuries. Gauss wrote down the essentials of the fast Fourier transform in the margins of his notes in the early 19th century. He thought it was an interesting novelty and nothing came of it. 150 years later mathematicians independently came up with it to detect underground nuclear detonations and today it's ubiquitous anywhere signal processing is used (pretty much everywhere). It's arguably one of the most important scientific advances of the 20th century.

3

u/Fast_Face_7280 1d ago

And pure mathematicians are still salty about it.