u/exophades

As you have certainly noticed, there have been tons of posts recently about major problems being solved by AI, or by actual researchers being assisted by AI. What shocked me, in particular, is how everyone is posting about visualising stuff like the Navier-Stokes forced blowup solution, or about the Yang–Mills existence and mass gap problem being the next target for AI companies.

Seriously, how many people even understand the Navier-Stokes equations ? How many people actually studied anything about partial differential equations or fluid mechanics? Why aren't we having more posts on book recommendations on PDEs, or even ODEs, or even simply newbie questions about how to approach a PDE, which are honest attempts at understanding? I literally get second-hand embarassment when some redditors, who clearly aren't researchers on PDEs, discuss the details of OpenAI's solutions to Navier-Stokes.

Math and physics are not a spectator sport, studying these subjects is a serious activity that takes years of diligent practice to get good at, and most people, sometimes even with a lot of effort, never get past the undergraduate level, or even high school level. Please, let's stop pretending we know anything about research-frontiere problems, respect the fact that expert-level mathematics and physics should be discussed by experts, and go back to actually learning.

Three years ago, I asked ChatGPT to compute 3*(2+5) and it told me it's equal to 11. I laughed, took a screenshot of its answer, and showed it to my friends, colleagues, family, everyone, telling them that AI is the biggest BS bubble in history, and that once it bursts, only intelligent people like me (or so I thought) would snap out of it.

Fast forward to now, and I'm seeing astra doing the work of a professional, highly trained infographist in the blink of an eye, and an internal openAI model cracking one of the most difficult math problems in the history of mankind. There is nothnig left guys, this is not some "paradigm shift" to which people will eventually adapt and then move on with their lives. This is literally manufacturing a more raw form of intelligence that mimicks human intelligence but with much more data, much more processing power, and zero distractions. Machines don't get mad, don't get tired of trying, they'll keep attacking the problem until they find the ingenious insight that no human on earth has ever been able to figure out.

It takes human beings 20 minutes on average to fully refocus on a task after being distracted. A cutting edge AI model can solve a graduate level problem in this timeframe. OpenAI's internal model cracked Navier-Stokes in 88 hours. The entirety of human mathematicians couldn't do this in 88 years. If these figures are not alarming to you, you should think about them a bit, this is huge, like really, really huge, cataclysmic-level huge.

This is not the kind of revolutions we saw in the 20th century with computers and telecommunications, this is a much deeper revolution. We're getting close to automating ourselves, and the suspicion is growing that our automated selves are orders of magnitudes better.