The research community is in uproar after OpenAI released a trove of more than 700 mathematical preprints entirely generated by AI on 6 October. The San Francisco, California-based maker of ChatGPT posted the preprints on the software repository Github.
Although some mathematicians celebrated the solution of longstanding problems, others took to social media to complain about being scooped. Some were incensed at what one physicist called a ‘slopocalypse’, even if the mathematical content could end up being formally correct.
I saw the Wired article yesterday, it’s worse than it sounds.
For at least one of the problems an OpneAI researcher initiated a partnership with a mathametician, loaded all of his work into a chatbot without his knowledge, and then published the result as 100% from the chatbot in this “trove”.
When the mathematician confronted the OpenAI employee, he was told sharing credit was “too complicated” so they wouldn’t acknowledge he had already mostly had it done. When he tried to push back, OpenAI then threatened his career if he tried to tell people what had happened.
It’s is very very unlikely that was a single case. If that happened once, they definitely at least tried it more than once.
Even if it actually solved anything, taking in years of human work and then spitting out one last step is nowhere near what they’re portraying this as. They’re intentionally making it sound like they just gave the chat or the problem and it solved what a human couldn’t.
All it did was steal human work and rush publication
The whole threatening careers thing happened with navier stokes too.
These people are completely rotten to the core.
The fluid equation folks?
and thus ended academic collaborations with OpenAI.
https://x.com/doomslide/status/2108121379660832930
here’s a paper in their dump that is very similar to what humans uploaded a month ago
same poster goes on to say that the scale of the intellectual fraud is unbelievable
Solving math proofs with AI is like doing art with AI. Pointless. There are practical problems and calculations computers could solve instead, but they’re targeting the mathematical community directly to undermine the discipline as a whole. This means people will stop sharing work and insights with each other, which has never been the case before.
I don’t know what you’re trying to say, and I feel like you don’t either.
That part was clearly, but obviously false on multiple levels
I’m actually paraphrasing Terence Tao and some of the top mathematicians on the planet: pre-AI, math researchers discussed and shared ideas about their work. Now they are increasingly afraid of getting scooped, and you can see why.
Non-mathematicians don’t realize this, but proofs aren’t intrinsically valuable (useful in any way whatsoever) outside of what they mean about the community capable of creating them. Destroying that community is game over.
Scientific discoveries without scientists could still be useful to society. Not so about mathematical proofs without mathematicians.
That doesn’t even mean you’re saying the same thing bud…
Do you think “non-mathematicians” think solving a math problem magically gets someone a check? Like, if anythi g you have it backwards
You’re way off on everything though.
You should paraphrase less, wait till after you understand what you’re reading.
I provided a link. Are you… not able to read?
What do you think I mean by “valuable” and why would that equal “getting a check”?
Fucking bizarre. This might be the dumbest conversation I’ve participated in this week.
it might not even be the last step in a way. A person may have it solved but worries about publishing until they check and double check and run it down a few times to be sure and then of course there is the writing. So really it might just be acting as a technical writer for the researcher at best.
Ok, but literally all it does is steal human work and provide an output.
I wonder how the mathematician expected it to go. Was he expecting to be directly provided the AI output so he could publish it? Was he going to care if the AI used a novel approach he hadn’t employed and was unable to identify where it got it from? We have seen since the beginning that AI has an attribution problem, so it seems like his actual concern was that HE wasn’t credited.
I’m not an AI supporter, but this whole “it did just a small part” complaint is weird to me. I believe I read that most were solved in 3 hours of compute. I’m sure the mathematician wasn’t just 3 hours from solving the problem. It did it faster than humans did. Isn’t that the point? Does it matter how little the step was if it hadn’t been taken yet? It could’ve taken mathematics years to make that last step. Shouldn’t we be excited to see this development? If we’re going to have AI, isn’t the point that it accelerates problem solving. If AI sped up life saving medical research by years or even just months by doing one last step, would people be having the same reaction?
I’ve seen the same people complaining about this regularly talk about using AI for coding. Why is it ok that so many companies have put programmers in this position, but all the sudden it’s bad for mathematicians?
the former has just been normalized and tech bros are hard at work trying to normalize the latter, but it’s not ok in either case