OpenAI's $15M Navier-Stokes proof and how credit will work

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 15:55

   A month or two ago was open, you know, so ancient history now. As OpenAI published the solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, which was this one of the seven clay millennium problems with this with these million dollar prizes. Right. In this case, they actually did put significant, you know, they were not experts in differential equations on this problem, but they did put significant resources. They put like 15 million dollars of compute into solving this one million dollar problem.

2. 16:27

   And then they published this 166-page argument. They also had a formal certificate in this system called Lean, sort of proving that it was valid. And the reaction to this was very, from the mathematical community, I think, was very negative. and this was partly because you know there were humans who had been sort of closing in on this problem and open ai was tipped off to what those humans were doing we still don't know exactly how much they knew and and and when they knew it but but that was what prompted them to then rush ahead with their vastly greater computing power and get there first and people felt like you know well like that's that's that's that's not sporting and so then because open ai was burned by the sort of by the negative reaction to that like since then like they've been sitting on

3. 17:23

   solutions to a ton of other big open problems and now they appointed a board of of experts which includes fields medalists like timothy gowers uh edward witten people like that okay who are going to decide what to do with these with you know with all of these solutions but but my my expectation is that at some point you know very soon in fact you know all these things are going to be published all right like you know we're going to start seeing hundreds of solutions to significant open problems that in most cases no human has gone through okay no human has actually you know check them i mean you know in some cases there will be lien certificates so we sort of formally know that they're valid in other cases there probably won't even be that i heard a joke that maybe you know these papers should be published and and the author should be listed as

4. 18:26

   gpt 6.1 or whatever and then in the acknowledgments it should say like oh thank i i'm so grateful to this person for suggesting the problem to me. But I think the more likely way that this goes is that we will just see some online repository for all these sort of AI solutions that have not yet been digested. And then at human speed, humans will go through them. They will do their best to understand the arguments, to re-explain them in better words, to simplify them, to extend them.

5. 19:09

   And then they will publish papers doing that with their human names on them. And those papers are what humans will then receive credit for. You mentioned OpenAI sitting on proofs of major