alt Hacker NewsThe timeline here does not support your argument. Quoting from Buckmaster's statement:
For most of the past year progress was slow. We worked through the literature and upgraded various preliminary results, up to obtaining finite time blow up for the Incompressible Porous Media equation (with smooth forcing). This was until about a month ago, when we had real progress: on August 15th, we obtained the blow up results, with smooth forcing, for both Boussinesq and Euler.
I can say the first LLM generated proof Levent sent me was the most horrendous I have ever read; we verified it on Lean on August 22nd. Since this point, we have been working around the clock to understand this proof and turn it into something readable.
And you avoided addressing the critical issue: they weren't even solving the same problem. Buckmaster solved a simplified and easier version of Navier-Stokes. OpenAI solved a harder version eligible for the Millennium prize. Buckmaster did not.
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fwip • today at 11:53 AM
Yes, people generally solve easier problems before tackling the harder ones. The tools that you develop to solve the easy ones help you solve the next. Sometimes the climb is like a mountain, but sometimes it's like dominos.
> I can say the first LLM generated proof Levent sent me was the most horrendous I have ever read; we verified it on Lean on August 22nd. Since this point, we have been working around the clock to understand this proof and turn it into something readable.
People are acting as if OpenAI's cold machines snatched the result from the warm hands of human researchers. That's why people are so involved, they see it as humans vs. machines.
But in reality, those humans in question rely heavily on AI and would not be able to do what they did without AI. So the situation can be seen as "humans are trying to minimize the impact AI/incl. OpenAI had on getting a solution".
The situation is not "humans vs. machines", but "machines with a tiny bit of human involvement vs. machines with an even smaller amount of human involvement".
However much the researcher's chat history may have influenced AI, this pales in comparisson to how much AI has influenced researchers. They are not even closely in the same universe. The conversation about the level of plagiarism is silly.