This past week, OpenAI dumped a staggering trove of answers to elusive math problems solved by its internal artificial intelligence models – the mathematics world isn’t happy about it. “What are they trying to achieve? I don’t know. They’re just destroying early-career mathematicians with a PR stunt,” says NYU math professor Tristan Buckmaster. Buckmaster and his collaborator Levent Alpöge had made significant progress on solving an historic math equation before OpenAI’s model beat them to it. They’ve “destroyed the whole incentive system for science and mathematics.”
It feels like there’s a lot of doublespeak going on in this clip. One sentence says “OpenAI didn’t solve shit and doesn’t deserve any credit for anything” and the next says “LLMs are revolutionizing how we do math.” I’m not sure we can really conclude whether LLMs have any actual application in this kind of advanced mathematics… or anywhere else for that matter.
When I machine a part, the lathe does most of the heavy lifting, but it’s a tool and it doesn’t deserve any credit for anything. Yet without it, it would take me hours to file a round part imperfectly that takes me 10 seconds to turn to perfection on the lathe. The lathe is absolutely essential to my workshop.
Two things can be true at the same time.
Maybe. But it’s not as if all the LLM companies don’t have a history of making things up out of whole cloth to make their products seem more useful for real-world problems than a puddle of vomit.
“We solved a millennium problem” sounds impressive until you find out they just stole it and then pushed the one who deserves the credit to cut out the other one who deserves credit. So what are we going to find out about the other 722 that makes it clear the whole story was a scam?
I don’t think that’s what doublespeak is. That’s just contradicting statements. Doublespeak is when you’re using language that obscures the meaning of the words used.