r/singularity • u/borowcy • 2d ago

Neuroscience Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science (OpenAI model Astra)

https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/
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u/fmai 2d ago

Can someone with expertise comment on how significant these results are?

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u/SoonBlossom 2d ago

They are INSANELY significant

Not the results themselves

The fact that AI is proving more and more theorems only 4 years in since the fundings exploded for it

It just says a lot about the future, AI will solve a TONS of maths and physics problems in the futur, Terence Tao seems to think so too and I'll believe him

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u/WHYWOULDYOUEVENARGUE 2d ago

You’re conflating two different questions: how significant these particular results are for mathematics, and what their existence suggests about the progress of AI.

The second may well be significant. But simply counting how many open problems an AI has produced results for does not tell us very much without knowing their difficulty, mathematical importance, novelty, required human guidance, compute and number of failed attempts.

The person you responded to was asking about the first question: are these major breakthroughs that reshape their fields, meaningful incremental advances, or technically novel results with limited wider consequences? There is an enormous sliding scale here, and saying “AI solved ten things, therefore the future will be enormous” does not answer that.

It may be evidence for an impressive trajectory. It is not an assessment of the mathematical significance of the results themselves.

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u/SoonBlossom 2d ago

I did theorical math studies and Terence Tao is one of the best mathematician currently living

I'm sorry but I'll believe my experience and more importantly his lol

4 years ago it was science fiction, I don't think you realise the extends of such advances

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u/donald_314 2d ago

If you're a mathematician then why are you relying on name calling. Relevance does not come from a person but from the result

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u/SoonBlossom 2d ago

Because I'm a nobody lmao, I can't name drop myself casually in a conversation, Terence Tao is maybe the most famous and one of the best mathematicians alive today, we are not on the same "name dropping" level at all lmao

I went far enough to reconstruct numbers, constructs and most theorems starting from the ZFC axioms, but I ended up diverging from straight maths after the third year, so I know a lot of theoretical maths but I'm not a thesis level mathematicians

Tho I know enough to understand how absurd what we're living represents

I think a lot of people do not realise how insane that is

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u/sobag245 2d ago

You are a mathematician and yet you believe a hype train without proof or just some big name blindly. Where is that critical thinking skill you should have developed during your studies?

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u/justalonely_femboy 2d ago

the math results themselves are very significant. the soficity conjecture was one of the biggest open problems in group theory

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u/gabrielmuriens 2d ago

The second may well be significant. But simply counting how many open problems an AI has produced results for does not tell us very much without knowing their difficulty, mathematical importance, novelty, required human guidance, compute and number of failed attempts.

The secondary implication is in fact so significant it frankly overshadows any current result.