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rsferntoday at 11:55 AM2 repliesview on HN

I think this is dramatized to the point it’s talking past the article, the math community isn’t really making any of these arguments from what I can tell.

The discourse is (1) models are capable of making really impressive mathematical advances, usefulness is not in dispute, (2) the frontier AI companies aren’t being super transparent about information sources so it’s hard to know exactly how to evaluate the level of capability that was demonstrated, and (3) there are lots of kinds of math that is interesting and there are open questions about how to get there.

In particular this article highlights a particular open question I’ve seen discussed on HN before, which is that the particular proof strategy of finding a counterexample might be more amenable to RL than other strategies of proof that might be needed to resolve the other branches of the Navier Stokes problem (and probably other similar areas of math)


Replies

fmbbtoday at 8:53 PM

Is it really impressive, or just kind of interesting?

If they spent about 10 GWh solving the problem (was it solved?) then that is much much more than 500 lifetimes of a human brain working.

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busssardtoday at 2:51 PM

yeah i agree its dramatized, but the situation was quite dramatized by the parties involved as well. i just find it quite funny, that the perceived drama might play out like this now.