by liberal japonicus
The NYTimes Headlines reports that an OpenAI has just solved one of the Millenium problems, the Navier-Stokes equations. Yay, us!
Err, just a second. Quanta has this at the end of their article.
OpenAI admits that their work on the Navier-Stokes equation was inspired by rumors that Alpöge and Buckmaster had solved a Millennium Prize problem. (They hadn’t quite, though they say they have an unverified proof of blowup for a somewhat easier version of Navier-Stokes.) Using a new internal model, OpenAI employed groups of autonomous AI agents of various sizes to attack variants of the Euler and Navier-Stokes problems. “Nearly 100 agents worked together for approximately 50 hours to produce our Euler regularity disproof,” the company wrote in a press release. They then deployed an even bigger group of agents — 10,000 or so — to attack Navier-Stokes. After 88 hours, the agents running on the internal model had a proof of a singularity in Navier-Stokes, and after an additional 17 hours, another AI model had formalized the result. In total, the agents sent almost 5 million messages to each other. Sébastien Bubeck of OpenAI estimates the computational cost at several million dollars.
Are you sure that you solved it? Here is an article discussing the problem
According to the four-page public statement from Buckmaster, after OpenAI learned that the two sides’ research directions were close, it proposed two publishing plans to him.
The first plan:
Buckmaster and Alpöge publish the Euler equations results first, and OpenAI releases the Navier–Stokes proof the next day.
The second plan:
Buckmaster writes the paper on behalf of both sides, and publishes the Navier–Stokes results obtained by OpenAI’s internal model.
But Buckmaster claimed that OpenAI researcher Sebastien Bubeck stated twice that he hoped to exclude Alpöge from the author list.
Why?
The reason is very simple, Alpöge works for Anthropic.
Mathematical achievements can be discussed, but it is not convenient for people from competing companies to be on the same author list.
Here is the pdf link to the 4 page statement mentioned above. God, OpenAI sucks.
AI is the current global version of a gold rush, and OpenAI are just doing a bit of bushwhacking and claim jumping to get a seam to work. We’ll just ignore for the moment that these epoch defining achievements are not sustainable, and their claims that everyone will have an AI like this working for them is a transparent lie.
On a related note, my wife’s publishing agency is busy finalizing the details of her Anthropic settlement claim – which comes to less than she made on a single advance for any of the books that Anthropic fed to their models without securing any permissions.
The entire Anthropic settlement is only fifteen times the total amount that OpenAI threw at one math problem just so that they could beat the first team to publication and claim all the prestige.
Chump change for the would-be masters of the universe.
I truly hope there is a singularity so that we can drop them all into it.