> And I mourn the path not taken, and the opportunities lost in the frantic race to develop this technology. Labs submitting their frontier models to independent researchers for proper scientific evaluation. Coordination with the research community to ensure these tools are applied to complement and enhance the abilities and activities of human researchers, rather than compete with them. Use of these tools to foster collaboration and sharing, rather than competition and secrecy. Opening new doors, without closing old ones.
But that is not the path we now find ourselves in. Instead, the community needs to come together more than ever. To clearly declare our own standards and values, to build our own tools and practices, to support our most vulnerable members, and to chart our own path forward. Let’s get to work.
We should remember that we are all in this together; mathematics is a marathon, not a sprint; and the goal is and always will be the human understanding of mathematics, which will invariably take time.
What is worrying me the most, at the moment, is actually the (in)security of cryptography. Finding algorithms breaking standard cryptographic protocols is a number theory problem whose difficulty does, to my non-expert eyes, not significantly exceed what these systems are now capable of. And it would have disastrous consequences on society if such an algorithm is found.
> One thing to keep in mind about this drop of papers is that they were not created by OpenAI with the main goal of making progress in mathematical research, or even primarily for PR (there were some PR posts, but e.g. the final announcement was comparatively restrained). The main reason these papers exist is that OpenAI used unsolved math problems to evaluate their internal models for the purpose of improving their capabilities. They had to use hard open problems because these are the only ones still posing a challenge to frontier AI models. I believe that, from OpenAI’s point of view, the papers are essentially a byproduct of their internal development.