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The post seems to make this assumption that AI companies are going to want to solve all the major outstanding problems in mathematics, and possibly some adjacen
by YeGoblynQueenne 8d ago
The post seems to make this assumption that AI companies are going to want to solve all the major outstanding problems in mathematics, and possibly some adjacent fields like Computer Science and Physics, maybe.
Is that really the case? The cost to OpenAI for the Navier-Stokes problem has been estimated in the millions of dollars, anything between 6 and 40 million depending on who you ask. Now, I know that OpenAI has a lot of money stashed under the mattress but we have to remember that they by no means had any guarantee that the money they spent would actually solve the problem. In fact, they have probably burned similar amounts of money for many other problems that we have never heard anything about, for the simple reason that their super-secret in-house special models didn't solve them.
What I'm saying is that you need to think of the monetary constraints to solving major open problems in maths etc. If it costs millions of dollars a pop for a shot in the dark that has a small chance to succeed, that's not something that's sustainable. Letting the users take on some of that cost by burning through their own token budget so that they can claim to solve a problem that "has stumped mathematicians for 80 years" and the like, can make reduce the cost a bit but by how much? Remember that OpenAI had 10,000 agents running for 88 hours on Navier-Stokes. Who, outside of AI companies, has that many tokens? What power user is going to spend thousands of millions to try and solve the Millennium Prize problems?
So, really, maybe mathematicians who are looking forward to a new era of AI-generated results that advance mathematics may end up being disappointed. AI companies are not charities, they do not really care about mathematics and they aren't doing things that they don't think will bring them more money, somehow. And when did solving mathematical problems bring anyone any money?