[famouswaffles]

>What, Erdős problems? It's hard to see how anyone except mathematicians, and then again only a few communities of mathematicians, especially care about those.

Erdős problems vary enormously in difficulty and significance. The fact that a problem is obscure to non-mathematicians does not make its solution unimportant. There are also many major open problems in computer science that most laypeople have never heard of.

>That they started with Erdős problems? I'd have gone for a Millennium Prize problem, first. P vs NP, Riemann, Navier Stokes, those are heavy-weight results that would establish AI as the de facto approach to mathematics for the foreseeable future.

Solving the biggest, most famous open problems would "establish AI as the de facto approach to mathematics for the foreseeable future"? It would do a lot more than that.

>That's exactly how research works in general, both in academia and in industry.

Then what exactly is the objection? Research normally produces many failures and incremental results before a major success. Do you apply this survivorship-bias criticism to every published mathematical result, or only when a machine contributed to it?

>Actually, that's a good point but it's in support of my contention.

If they're running as many problems as constantly as you imagine then they did not miss all that. So either they're just not sharing it us which contends with your "desperate to demonstrate mathematical competence" or they have their eyes on a more curated set.

>Or, to abuse Fermi's question, where is everybody?

If we had as many verified alien encounters as LLM contributions to open problems, nobody would be invoking the Fermi Paradox. Where is everyone? Right here.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Then what exactly is the objection? Research normally produces many failures and incremental results before a major success. Do you apply this survivorship-bias criticism to every published mathematical result, or only when a machine contributed to it?

Yes I do. Not mathematical results specifically but generally research results. I might even have articulated that criticism on HN. I don't know if I could search for it easily though.

>> If they're running as many problems as constantly as you imagine then they did not miss all that. So either they're just not sharing it us which contends with your "desperate to demonstrate mathematical competence" or they have their eyes on a more curated set.

The people desperate to demonstrate mathematical competence are the AI companies. The people discussed in the part of my comment you quote are "random people" by which I meant the "3d parties" in your original comment.

[famouswaffles]

>Yes I do. Not mathematical results specifically but generally research results. I might even have articulated that criticism on HN. I don't know if I could search for it easily though.

Okay Fair, but then this is a general research issue and not really a Open AI issue.

>The people desperate to demonstrate mathematical competence are the AI companies. The people discussed in the part of my comment you quote are "random people" by which I meant the "3d parties" in your original comment.

I'm not sure you got the point i was making. The point there was that if Open AI were running as many problems as frequently as you imagine they are then those 3rd party results should have been achieved by them, and if they're really so desperate to tell us how good the model is for math then why didn't they tell us ? Why have they only announced 2 results when they could have announced near a dozen by now ? Sure these 2 are in a class of their own, but some of the others are genuinely impressive in their own right and would certainly help that narrative you're talking about.

Either they're just not telling us and aren't as desperate as you imagine, or they're simply only interested/running models in a relatively few set of problems.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Or they're not solving as many problems as they'd like, despite trying.