cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9497419

The Millennium Problems are a set of the most important open problems in mathematics. so far only 2 have been solved: the Poincare Conjecture by Grigori Perelman in 2010 and today OpenAI released this https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

The only problem is, that their AI didn’t even come up with the solution itself. Mathematicians working on the same problem recently made big strides in solving the Navier Stokes equations, and their chat logs were scraped and used in training data before they could release the proof themselves.

Here is the unpaywalled statements of the Mathematician: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117233413705701198

Western AI companies have been tackling a bunch of open problems and techbro chuds cannot shut up about it, this is just Marketing and the fact they have to steal real people’s work to do so just proves it. They really want that IPO moneyyy capitalist-laugh

  • mazzilius_marsti@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    these news site really need to research or write better.

    No, Navier Stokes was not “solved”. We have been using numerical methods to solve these equations approximtely since forever. The exact analytical solutions that exist for special cases are also studied; most often, these are used as baseline for comparison against new theory , new experimental results and new computer simulations. So, we have been “solving” Navier Stokes.

    What OpenAI manages to achieve is answering a very specific problem relate to Navier Stoke (sorry for hand waving, not a pure math major). It is something like: given an initial flow condition, does the Navier Stoke equation predict this flow field to blow up or it stays smooth for some finite time? Result: OpenAI manages to come up with a case where the solution blow up.

    Mathematically, i bet some math geniuses can expand on this finding as like a “special property” of the Navier Stoke equations.

    So no we are still far solving the whole equation analytically.

  • hypnicjerk@piefed.social
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    19 hours ago

    turns out if you throw hundreds of billions of dollars at math problems, you tend to find solutions, who knew?

    the worst part, to me, is the implication that such solutions are a question of capability and not of resources

  • orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts
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    22 hours ago

    This feels like when you’re telling a story or a joke and someone swoops in from the sidelines to steal the punchline. Only like 100x worse.

  • mystic-macaroni@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    Woah. Navier Stokes has been solved? That’s a huge deal. And fuck openai for undercutting the people who made it possible.

    • onceandfuturealice@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      From what I’ve read, the Millennium prize proposition was basically “Prove it holds in all cases (sounds to me like a closed form solution), or prove it doesn’t hold in all cases”, and the proof published by OpenAI proves the latter, i.e. that Navier-Stokes does not hold in some extreme cases.

      • mkwt@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        This is still a big deal result with a lot of physical significance if it holds up.

        Full Navier-Stokes are / were understood to model all of the important physics associated with continuous domain fluids. (Continuous domain here means we approximate the many, many particles of the fluid as a smooth, continuous substance).

        In particular, Navier-Stokes are supposed to fully model fluids with turbulence. Turbulence is an everyday phenomenon that you can reproduce for yourself in your kitchen sink, and yet it is extremely difficult to formulate a mathematical function for it. Turbulence appears to be random if you look at it, and yet if it is produced by NS, then it is not random. Solving even the numeric approximations of NS for turbulent flows is difficult because the flows exhibit severe variation in velocity over wide ranges of time and distance scales.

        Anyhow, if NS is a good physical theory it has to have a physically realistic solution to every physically-possible set of initial conditions and environmental forcing functions. In math terms this mainly means that all of the velocities, pressures, and forces have to be finite and smooth at all times. Step discontinuities don’t really occur in the real physical world (although they do approximately occur).

        This result would mean that NS is not the end all final theory for classical continuum fluids. The scenario constructed by OpenAI is claimed to be one that can (at least theoretically) be setup and run in the real world. But if we did that, the real world is certain to do something else besides the infinite flow velocity vortex that OpenAI claims NS predicts. What would really happen in that experiment? Who knows. We’re gonna need to find some new physics to find out.

    • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Well “solved” is a bit of a weird way to say it. Was it proven as true, or was it disproven? Both of those change things in different ways.

      Proven true that it is a stable formula, then that’s cool, and we know that issues with fluid simulations based off of that are a software and compute problem.

      If it was disproven, then we learn precisely under what specific conditions nature becomes mathematically unpredictable, and then we can start developing different and better models.

      • mystic-macaroni@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        My understanding is that it has only been shown to have closed form analytical solution for very simple cases. “Solved” in this case would mean doing the same for more complex geometries. It would mean finding new functions like spherical harmonics or the Bessel Function.

  • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works
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    18 hours ago

    🎶plagerize Let no one’s else’s work evade your eyes So don’t shade your eyes But Plagerize Plagerize Plagerize 🎶 But of course don’t forget to call it… Research

  • underisk@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    Everything AI does is with stolen data. What makes this so special?

    • reallykindasorta@slrpnk.net
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      1 day ago

      It’s like if they wrote gta VI in notepad and Microsoft released it saying they made it… so not really different except they didn’t even let the author publish it first

    • loaExMachina [any]@hexbear.net
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      2 hours ago

      The fact that AI had solved this problem made big noise, and was used by many to legitimize AI as a source of progress, so setting the record straight on how it really did it is pretty important.

      Beside, solving a millenial problem is a big deal. Even if it had been solved by human researchers and it was later found that they had plagiarized other human researchers, this would’ve been noteworthy. So I would say this is pretty special.

    • thanksforreading@lemmy.ml
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      19 hours ago

      Why is the fact that an AI company is surveilling their users and stealing their work in a privacy comm?

      • hirihit640@sh.itjust.works
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        19 hours ago

        surveilling users? chats are fed into the training data, I believe this is stated pretty clearly on every chat, something like "your chats are used to improve the model’

        • trilobite@lemmy.ml
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          3 hours ago

          I think this is the real problem here. Chats are being fed to AI. This is horendous. Do we know which chat system was raked by OpenAI.

        • thanksforreading@lemmy.ml
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          18 hours ago

          Only in certain plans and you can opt out. I assume they were smart enough to opt out but on review I couldn’t actually find evidence of that so you may be right…

          • leanleft@lemmy.ml
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            15 hours ago

            this is the whole selling-point of locallama and why local models are so rigorously sought after (despite seeming excessive(seemingly needless) spending on rigs )

    • leanleft@lemmy.ml
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      15 hours ago

      it would be a better fit for intellectualproperty community . or maybe security. i guess it sorta could be privacy. just not the way most people tend to focus on. intellectualproperty is the bigger issue. but it occured due to lack of privacy .

    • BeatTakeshi@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      Somewhere down the article:

      While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models⁠.

      • hirihit640@sh.itjust.works
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        8 hours ago

        I’m aware that the data is used to train models. Most people know this, it’s stated clearly. That’s not the story here. The story is IP theft, not privacy.

        • BeatTakeshi@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          That’s the whole debate… If researchers used ChatGPT then they agreed to its terms and conditions, which are shitty and forfeiting privacy, IP and all that comes with it. All the major AI companies are not in the business for the sake or betterment of humanity, but to exacerbate the capitalist model in which you own nothing (funny how that’s how communism is sometimes described). I mean the whole drama with Altman and OpenAI, that basically killed the initial nonprofit, humanist goals of Open AI was very revealing. I read a quote the other day that said AI is a means for wealth to access skills and knowledge, while preventing those with skills and knowledge to access wealth… Couldn’t say it any better.

          • trilobite@lemmy.ml
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            3 hours ago

            This is why use of AI needs to be a conscious use. We need to understand that everytime we use it, we are teaching it to improve itself, and if we are feeding it sensitive data, then we are being really stupid.

  • Zerush@lemmy.ml
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    19 hours ago

    Steal their work? well, but mathematician worked a lot of years on the problem without a solution, means that their work wasn’t correct. Apart scientific papers are accessible by everyone, not only AIs. Maybe the mathematicians have to think a little more about teamwork, storing their work locally or encrypted, instead claims about copyright and AI stealing their work. But the capabillity of AIs is to be able to find interrelations between millons of datas in hours, something for what humans need decades to do the same. That is the point and also the danger of AI, it get the data it needs from everywhere and web content is open, AI don’t have any ethics or respect of copyrights, all web content is information as is. All you put online is public (or everything online) by definition, there isn’t any copyright to avoid it.

    • Urist@lemmy.ml
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      3 hours ago

      The original team had used AI to solve the problem. However, they did not want to publish AI slop (think one of the authors actually described their initial proof as such, which is hilarious in hindsight). Then, the not so open to anything but stealing, openai stole their almost finished work and used tons of compute to finish it.

      Your reply is incoherent and out of touch with the reality of what happened.