Mathematicians scramble to digest OpenAI's breakthrough results

Scott Aaronson says he's never seen anything like this in mathematics, as researchers race to understand OpenAI's breakthroughs, including a problem he posed 20 years ago: "Across the mathematical research world, you have seen people drop what they are doing to understand the solutions to their major open problems that OpenAI just dumped onto GitHub a week ago. I’ve never seen a moment like this in my life in mathematical research." "A question that I posed 20 years ago with Greg Kuperberg, the unitary synthesis problem, was one of the 370 problems that OpenAI announced solutions to. Just yesterday there was a workshop at Columbia already trying to understand this proof." "Instead of just resigning or hiding under a rock somewhere, they are racing to try to understand this stuff."…

Ex-OpenAI researcher Scott Aaronson says an asteroid has landed on mathematics, and denial is no longer a viable strategy: "It would be crazy to not be worried right now about the future of the mathematical community. This is an asteroid that has landed on our world. People are in different stages of denial, grief, bargaining, acceptance. But denial is just not going to be a viable strategy." "The model that OpenAI used is something that will plausibly be available to regular subscribers a few months from now." "Almost any paper that you read will contain a little AI statement which explains which parts came from Astra or from Claude. That became part of writing a paper within the last few months, without any fanfare." "Normally you say, it would be interesting to follow up this result,…

Ex-OpenAI researcher Scott Aaronson explains how AI is breaking mathematical limits once thought impossible, including a 50-year barrier to multiplying numbers: "A month ago we saw a solution of the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the seven millennium problems. If water were an infinitely divisible substance, just following the laws of classical physics, in finite time some of the water would get accelerated to an infinite speed." "There’s now a way to multiply two n-digit integers in time that is less than n log n, which had stood as a barrier for half a century. Many of us believed that was gonna be the ultimate limit. Now we know it’s not." "There’s a better algorithm for the Fourier transform. Your phone, all your electronics are using it constantly. We just learned that what we…

Ex-OpenAI researcher Scott Aaronson tells mathematicians they can't demand AI companies stop solving their problems: "What I don’t think we get to do is declare, well, the AI companies have to stop doing this, and no one’s allowed to do this. You just have to stop ruining our playground by solving all our problems. That is not our decision to make." "We may have come up with the problems, but once you publish a problem, the whole point is that it is there for anyone in the world to try to solve. Even if they’re a corporation that doesn’t always behave the way you would want them to." "A math problem, once it’s posed, belongs to the whole world." @UTAustin