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‘Pure insanity’: Mathematicians will need years to make sense of OpenAI’s latest drop (www.theverge.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 139 points 1 month ago (9 children)

This seems to be the mathematical equivalent of using AI to submit 200 unverified pull requests to an open source project and then telling the maintainers it's their job to figure it all out.

The one mathematician saying he's not going to spend hours of his time to verify if a slop report is true, let alone do it for dozens of reports, reminds me of all those projects making rules that unverified AI pull requests will be trashed.

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  • [–] 43 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I think OpenAI has retracted some of them already. For OpenAI it’s a really low-risk thing: if it’s wrong, then just retract the paper. If it’s right though, the fame all goes to OpenAI. Meanwhile, people who spent their whole life researching on this topic, needs to confirm this manually for OpenAI.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 month ago

    I mean, this is a step worse actually. We've already seen mathematicians claiming that these systems have actively scooped them. Lots of academics are using these systems regularly.

    At this point, every time I see a paper being "published" by an AI company, I'm wondering who they stole the result from.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 month ago*

    Also makes me wonder if it found and exploited (or got caught out by) some bugs in the Lean programming language...

    (Not saying Lean is buggy, but finding bugs seems more likely to me, as a programmer who knows not much about mathematical proofs since I haven't looked at anything like that since uni, about a decade ago)

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  • [+] -7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

    At least half of these are formally verified. Although they did retract 3 papers. Out of about 700

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  • [–] 23 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    No they aren't, about 40% of them claim to have been self-verified. But when actual mathematicians looks at them, it isn't even clear if the "proof" included is proving the thing the paper claims to prove. It all has to be looked at with great scrutiny to find out if any of it even has merit.

    OpenAI just dropped a bunch of busy work on the entire field of mathematics that may or may not turn into anything at all...

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    Saying "self-verified" is massively downplaying it. They are formalized and checked in Lean4 1, which is a programming language used by mathematicians today, to mechanically check their proofs to rule out human error. In other words a theory being stated in Lean generally means it's more likely to be correct than one stated in mere human language.

    Now, Lean, like any piece of software, has had bugs. A while back someone exploited a Lean bug to "prove" the Collatz conjecture 2. So it is possible that AI agents found a bug and used it. But the vibes I got from mathematicians in the field is that that's not very likely.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    It’s interesting that the one person who actually seems to know what they’re talking about is the one getting downvoted. AI is bad at many things for many reasons, but that doesn’t mean we should just assume that anything derived from AI is automatically slop.

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