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Re:Scattered thoughts on how doing math feels these days by an0malous on Thursday October 29, 2026 @05:48PM (#50296580)
The overselling of AI abilities is doing such a disservice to society right now. These companies don’t want to acknowledge how much human collaboration is going into their AI’s achievements because it undermines their value proposition, but I imagine there’s still quite a fair amount going into it and that’s one reason why OpenAI still won’t provide session traces of their models solving open math problems. If they were more transparent about it I think we’d see that human guidance, vision, judgement, taste, and other traits are still highly valuable and complimentary to AI abilities. It should also be a huge red flag how little of any of this output has been formally verified by third parties. I do think AI will eventually do all the things people believe it’s already doing, but I suspect there’s a fair amount of mechanical turking going on behind the scenes as you’d expect any company trying to raise a trillion dollar public offering might do.
Re:Scattered thoughts on how doing math feels these days by Jtarii on Thursday October 29, 2026 @06:31PM (#50297138)
Are you suggesting the ~500 mathematical results they have released over the past year are primarily human discovered?

I think they would have employ just about every mathematician on earth for that to make sense.

Re:Scattered thoughts on how doing math feels these days by nextaccountic on Thursday October 29, 2026 @06:34PM (#50297186)
No, but it required non trivial human work
Re:Scattered thoughts on how doing math feels these days by Jtarii on Thursday October 29, 2026 @07:01PM (#50297467)
I agree, a colossal amount of human effort had to go into building the machine in the first place.
Re:Scattered thoughts on how doing math feels these days by bgandrew1 on Thursday October 29, 2026 @06:35PM (#50297197)
What kind of work?
Re:Scattered thoughts on how doing math feels these days by wyre on Thursday October 29, 2026 @07:11PM (#50297568)
I don't have the math knowledge to answer your question directly, but Terrance Tao has posted his own session's, for reference: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a5fdc7a-d6f8-83e8-bbea-8deb42cfed...

OAI is not simply prompting "Prove exponential time hypothesis false. Make no mistakes" for the same reasons you can't one-shot "Write a fully standards compliant internet browser from scratch"

Re:Scattered thoughts on how doing math feels these days by jonlong on Thursday October 29, 2026 @08:00PM (#50297991)
Terry's session is his attempt to understand Fable's counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture, not an attempt to solve any open problem.

Levent Alpöge's prompting that did solve this open problem does not appear to be public, but Aaron Lou at OpenAI succeeded in reproducing the result the next day using an internal version of Codex and (reportedly) without web search, and he shared his prompt at https://aaronlou.com/jacobian_counterexample_prompt.pdf. It is a mathematically-sophisticated statement of the problem and of general search strategies, but contains no concrete ideas for the solution whatsoever (even the idea to look for a counterexample instead of a proof).

Aaron reported that this 2-page prompt found a counterexample in one shot. (https://x.com/aaron_lou/status/2079222629794189515)

Re:Scattered thoughts on how doing math feels these days by bgandrew1 on Sunday November 01, 2026 @03:41PM (#50329632)
You should realize that this number of results is greater than what humanity has produced over the past decade. That means either they hired thousands of mathematicians (which they obviously didn't), or they really did just use a prompt like the one you suggested.