3 ms·
The whole thing reeks of the desperation of an unprofitable venture-backed startup looking for its next PR win to keep the wind in the sails. But I think what’
by plaidfuji 25d ago
The whole thing reeks of the desperation of an unprofitable venture-backed startup looking for its next PR win to keep the wind in the sails.
But I think what’s being overlooked in the race to claim absolute credit is that both sides ultimately relied on a LLM (and one of OpenAI’s at that). Either a human researcher made a breakthrough discovery with the help of Codex, or the latest GPT model made a breakthrough with the help of human training data, or a little of both… either way it is undeniable that LLMs have quickly become an integral part of R&D workflows and are accelerating research.
This would be a major win for any normal company. You could even build a bigger collaboration with this guy, give him a big budget and push for extensions to this preliminary result, and in return do a write up on how he uses your model in his workflow. Huge PR win. What this says to me is that their valuation is so astronomical that they feel the only way to justify it is to demonstrate a fully autonomous discovery bot… which it simply is not.
- simianwords 25d agoA company that can solve Millenium problems is somehow still can’t ever make profits. How did you come to that conclusion
- plaidfuji 25d ago1. They are massively unprofitable. It is a statement of fact. Nowhere did I say “can’t ever”. 2. Even their pursuit of this problem was itself unprofitable - $15M in compute to solve a problem with a $1M prize. Not that that was the point, but still.
- curt15 25d agoIf you transplant a world class mathematician into a chemistry lab, do you expect similarly ground breaking results? Do you expect a top chemist to make major advances in mathematics? The frontier labs are likely betting on lay observers (read: investors) confusing headline-grabbing results in abstract mathematics with phenomenal profitability in more grounded endeavours. There is an implicit fallacy that "If our models can solve mathematics they can do everything else."
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