u/j15y

tl;dr: human-written word vomit about the Anthropic and OpenAI math results and the future of academia

Late on October 5th: two professors leading in a subfield of computer science called "fine-grained complexity theory" posted a paper refuting a conjecture on how fast a certain class of algorithms could be. Variants of this conjecture have been floating around literally since the subfield started in the 90's, and I personally know that one of the professors mentioned have been working on this problem for about 20 years now.

However: the breakthrough did not come from the professors, but from an Anthropic model. The details are in the paper, but tl;dr is that an employee at Anthropic just asked an internal version of Claude a related question, and it came up with an answer to this conjecture. Then Anthropic decided to reach out to the industry experts for verification. They came up with ways to simplify the proofs, connect it to the broader field, and ended up taking credit for the paper despite not having found the original proof.

Then yesterday (October 6th): OpenAI counters with 722 AI-written papers, claiming solutions to long-standing problems in so, so, many fields of math and computer science. I'm talking about problems that people have spent entire careers moving the needle on. Problems like:

• a huge step in the right direction towards proving one of the millennium problems (Riemann Hypothesis)
• a proof of something called the "unique games conjecture", which is a super important question about how hard it is to approximate the answer to some types of problems

Note that none of OpenAI's papers were human-verified/vouched for*.

I can't stop thinking about what this means for academia. I see research as three things: discovering new results, and checking that they're right, and teaching them to others. All of these make you a better researcher. AI is suddenly better than humans at the first one (most likely). Checking still needs experts who spend 20 years on a problem, but if AI solves the problems that used to train the next generation, where the fuck do future experts come from? And if AI can produce what a research producers in a career, why would anyone fund researchers anymore?

Anyway, I'd really love to hear other people (+Big A/Doug/Aidan's) thoughts on this. I'm not usually pessimistic about AI, but this has been a very crazy 48 hours.

*some of the papers have Lean code accompanying them, but even that requires human verification to make sure the statements proved are what the math says