I think OpenAI deserve credit for adjusting their approach after the last math drop. I think Terrance Tao shares some credit here for galvanizing the response.
Including the relevant mathematicians and scientists before dumping this onto the public is sure to go a long way to relaxing fears in those communities. I'm not sure how they will deal with accusations of favoritism but at least they are demonstrating a willingness to participate in a process.
I hope the community can express some positivity that will encourage OpenAI and other foundation labs to continue with this collaborative approach.
Well said. Attribution is important, for obvious human reasons and to direct people to valuable context. But our names will fade fast from history, what matters is the journey of human knowledge.
> It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
--Harry S. Truman
> It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Me, 2026
Jokes aside, this is a thought provoking quote. I do think it's easy to say as a well known figurehead, when the quote and other actions below you may easily be attributed to you, at least partially. But I do agree somewhat, and I think the context around Truman's time (WWII) is a good example of what humanity can accomplish when the stakes at hand supersede the considerations of workers' rights or credit/ownership. Of course this is also a very favorable phrasing for a period of enormous human suffering. I think there is an arms race analogy to be drawn here, though the current situation and stakes are much different.
Funnily enough, there’s a good chance Truman never said those words; the earliest known attribution of the quote to him is from a Time magazine article written in 1988. It’s not in any of his personal writing or speeches.
Yeah, and it’s amazing that we chose to build our society around maximizing the benefits of taking credit regardless.
(From [0])
'A man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it.'
"QI hypothesizes that a Jesuit Priest named Father Strickland deserves primary credit for this family of sayings. This claim is based on the diary entry dated September 21, 1863 written by Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff and multiple attributions thereafter. However, similar maxims may have been developed independently."
[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/12/21/doing-good-selfless
Isn't this ironically completely against the idea of not caring who gets the credit
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> It is amazing how far you can get by taking credit for accomplishments you didn't do by talking those who do accomplish things into not caring about the credit. --$clever
Feel free to replace $clever with any name of your convenience.
> If you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best
--Albert Einstein (Director, Los Alamos Laboratory)
Surely that was Oppenheimer.
"Any famous quote is eventually attributed to Albert Einstein"
-- Albert Einstein
"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet" -- Socrates
Attribution is a fascinating topic.
For example, one generally don’t name cells in their body, and cells works generally pretty well to sustain a whole self.
On societal level, obviously no one is aware of who authored the biggest mass of benefit that is granted by the mere fact of living in society. No specific individual have credits for example regarding the language they use daily¹. For the most recent ones, it’s now often possible to attach some name to invention of some cultural/technological artifact, but of course Zeitgeist-wise perspective tend to consider it’s rarely a single punctual individual that should be considered the critical pivot point.
On the other hand, even Marx that was so critical of individual alienation couldn’t refrain to make the intellectual equivalent of pissing territory and attach a name referring to its own ego within all of his works. Ego is a masterpiece of illusion: it will bring the foundational leveraging to build every possible societal hegemony under the sun while convincing the deluded that serving the ego is the indispensable first step of everything to best serve every individual selfs.
¹ Even for constructed languages, such as Esperanto that I practice myself, whoever construct them obviously don’t start from cultural blank slate.
I don't understand. The AI-math guidance counsel has recently explicitly argued against what you say in paragraph two, and which is why for the Kakeya problem there was no group formed. The different communities have given different suggestions. I'm not sure how much I agree with the first paragraph either given these facts.
The approach hasn't changed all that much. It's more that the scientific community is slowly starting to accept the inevitable.
From the article:
> We reached out to external experts and asked them to act as shepherds, organizing groups to understand the new results. They advised three different release strategies
1. They identified relevant experts for each of the discoveries they wanted to release
2. They collaborated with them to determine how to release the results
The effect for the first two (maths, comp sci) was the same because the experts they chose made that decision.
The downside here is actually the third case (physics). Since they only chose 5 scientists (David Gross, Michael Douglas, Arthur Jaffe, Igor Klebanov, and Nikita Nekrasov) and those scientists chose to keep the results private until they finish their own work. Everyone else who might be interested has to wait.
That was my favouritism aside. Scientists working on similar or adjacent problems that are not included in these kinds of private releases might feel they are not getting a fair chance.
This is a process that will change, but it seems they listened to the anger from the math community and made changes that help address the concerns.
I think, sadly, these fields will collapse further into a tighter in-group. Anyone outside that group will find it increasingly hard to penetrate. Talent won’t get you there anymore.
From my experience in research this was already the case 15 years ago (and from older peers, way before). Science has always has "in-groups". I forget the name of some philosopher in the 50's who was the opinion science is just a bunch of fads and it takes the old generation to die before a new idea can really be accepted.
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Max Planck 1949
Commonly paraphrased to: The knowledge quest proceeds funeral by funeral.
I'm happy to relax for six months, and ask Qwen-8-E2B on my Nintendo 3DS for the solution.
The hubris in the framing is astonishing, amusing and sad all at the same time. Many say, that's what HN attracts. Anyone who talks about inevitability except of death in these times is just someone who considers they'd be in the "have" rather the "have not" category.
I still can't see what this means for human understanding and how open would this knowledge be. Who'd ultimately get access to this stuff going forward and what kind of power games would ensue hereon.
I'm not sure why you think that someone who believes that this is inevitable is just someone who assumes they'd be in the "have" rather the "have not" category.
It seems like you are doing exactly what you accuse the parent commenter of doing. The only difference, perhaps, is that the commenter seems to extrapolate past progress to future progress, while your own assumption is a lot more tenuous.
What assumption do you think I make? I'm curious.
I just find it uncertain what lies ahead. I just don't see the sustainability in this. I have degrees in Mechanical Engineering, Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computing. If the "inevitable" is that I do manual labour till we can augment the robots to do that as well, I don't see how me or millions others similar to me have any agency.
Right now, a bunch of stuff is blurted out every month or quarter and people in notable positions are given a chance to "tidy it up". Let's assume that you have even the open weight models at your disposal, the hardware to run any of this in the kind of scale needed, requires capital of Governmental level funding.
Where I see this heading is that there'd be a divide of who controls the resources to produce and who gets delegated to do the menial work. If that's what you mean by my tenous assumption, please do share what you see differently.
Your assumption was that someone who believes that this is inevitable is just someone who assumes they'd be in the "have" rather the "have not" category. I agree there may be some correlation, but it is less of a sure thing than thinking AI replacing mathematicians is inevitable, in my opinion.
> It seems like you are doing exactly what you accuse the parent commenter of doing.
oh please
> slowly starting to accept the inevitable.
you're really full of it to assert it's "inevitable"
It’s always weird when people are so quick to use a single positive thing to trivialize the many historically questionable things an entity has done up till this point. It certainly doesn’t come from a place of rationality.
What is weird is criticizing people who acknowledge good things because of past bad things when nothing anyone said here, that I can see, anything close to "they are redeemed rejoice!"
> What is weird is criticizing people who acknowledge good things because of past bad things when nothing anyone said here, that I can see, anything close to "they are redeemed rejoice!"
This is like going to a politician's event and seeing him giving away lollipops to toddlers and kissing babies. But it's the same politician caught in corruption and embezzlement scandals.
You look at that and praise how they have redeemed. Other people look at that and see a corrupt politician handing out candy.
People tell us who they are through their actions. If you prove yourself to be capable of morally reprehensible things to the point throughout the years you build a reputation for all the morally reprehensible things you do, does your potential to do morally reprehensible things change if you go way out of your way to let people know that sometimes something's you do aren't morally reprehensible?
Wrong, these companies have shown time and time again they are irredeemably misaligned with our interests.
Right now you and everyone else is doing the "leave the multi billion dollar company alone" version of the neckbeard "leave the lady be" meme. And you deserved to be chastised for it.
Its the equivalent of you going around telling everyone in the office about how your boss is turning it around because they bought donuts today, after they spent three years telling you you're worthless, they're entitled to taking all the credit for your work and they plan on firing you as soon as they can.
Anyone can solve any problem they want and release it. Nobody is defending multibillion companies, they are pointing out hypocrisy when the same would be celebrated of it was some academic mathematician who also used ai released a solution vs open ai or any other entity doing so.
> Anyone can solve any problem they want
I'm pretty sure the multi billion dollar company has been throwing some of those multi billions at it
> and release it
"it" being a Lean proof that shows they could, technically, get a real mathematician to write down a real Math proof that could actually get published and be useful, right?
"it" being, a bunch of busy work for real mathematicians without the actual pay-off of discovery?
Nobody is forcing anyone to look at anything. Most human math papers don't even have a formal proof and now people are whining when a company goes beyond and releases formal lean proofs.
Do you disagree with the four color theorems proof? Do you know how much compute was used for that?
The history isn't particularly long.
> Including the relevant mathematicians and scientists before dumping this onto the public is sure to go a long way to relaxing fears in those communities.
You subtly invalidate their genuine fears. Valid fears don't need to be "relaxed".
> I think OpenAI deserve credit for adjusting their approach after the last math drop. I think Terrance Tao shares some credit here for galvanizing the response.
what do you mean they've put themselves in the spotlight constantly
This is going to be a very big deal in some of my circles, which include KITP (the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics), where David Gross was the Director for many years and now holds the Chancellor's Chair Professor in Theoretical Physics.
I’m not sure what meaningfully changed except for the QCD / yang mills result (where leaders in the field are going to do a review and write up first).
After their effort to take credit for the research of others last time, it's within OpenAI's best interests to go the extra mile to convince skeptics to not dismiss new research findings.
Allegedly.
> After their effort to take credit for the research of others last time, it's within OpenAI's best interests to go the extra mile to convince skeptics to not dismiss new research findings.
This.
The truth if the matter is that this is still a publicity stunt. This investment of time, effort, and compute is aimed at building a reputation that this company's model is better than the competition's. The previous publicity stunt brew up in their face, and now they seem to be trying to adapt and double down.
I would have found it a lot more impressive if they just empowered scientists through some kind of grant rather than to internalize all this. It sets the tone for what's to come and inevitably if what they find is juicy enough it will not be published. For instance once they start working on materials science (if they aren't already).
Surely they’re under some kind of NDA with Defence with regards to material science and physics, and required to hobble the publicly available models.
Why would you think that? Is a privately held company.
Attribution is very important. Though AI hasn't really done anything yet so it hasn't affected actual mathematicians yet.
Yeah it’s just one Millenium problem, no big deal. I was gonna crack quasi-Reimann next year anyway, just hadn’t gotten around to it.
All AI is good for is remixing frontier mathematics, there’s no way it could ever make its own. Right?
I hope it gets us somewhere new. You can hope that and appreciate it hasn't yet though. (I'm not part of their IPO)
It's parasitic on humans and it's not an infinitely deep well. Wrong?
Ok my original comment was snarky (apologies to all three mods), but you've raised one of my favorite topics so I can't resist engaging a bit more seriously! In the second clause, that is -- the first is trivially true in some senses and trivially false in others, so it doesn't seem very productive to nail down.
So Chomsky thought of himself as a philosopher of science more than anything, and his life mission is/was to answer a fascinating question: what kind of creatures are we? There's been a growing consensus going back to at least Darwin that we're separated from the rest of Animalia by our "reason" (!= intuition != understanding != judgement != volition), but he helped popularize an old theory[1] that puts it kind of beautifully: human language is only possible in beings capable of producing an infinite set of meaningful outputs in response to a finite input.[2] And so far, that list includes only two definite members: Homo sapiens sapiens, and computer programs built upon large language models.[3]
So all that to say: yes, I think you're wrong; the programmatic ensembles that brought us today's breakthroughs are an "infinitely deep well". As long as we have questions to ask, they are not theoretically constrained from answering them.
Of course, this invites some obvious follow-ups on practicality; even the most impassioned ASI boomer wouldn't argue that the exact ensembles used here could answer every question in the universe. But A) that's possible because some infinities are bigger than others, and B) the exact same caveat applies to humans, whose cognitive capabilities are thoroughly determined by accidents of biology, culture, and episteme. The latter is the thrust of Chomsky's famous debate with Foucault, which is absolutely worth a watch for anyone who hasn't seen it (starting around ~18:00, AFAIR): https://youtu.be/3wfNl2L0Gf8?t=1080
---
TL;DR: I ultimately disagree on both points, yes. In the ways that matter, machines are no more constrained than animals.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_von_Humboldt
[2]: Many animals are capable of communication, often quite complex and fascinating communication at that; even flora and fungi communicate! But language is qualitatively distinct. You may have heard this in the pithy-yet-mindbending sentiment "we've taught many apes to communicate with sign language, but none of them have ever asked a question."
[3]: It's no surprise in hindsight that trying to build better autocorrect got us to AGI; I find it unspeakably tragic that Chomsky never got the chance to see how thoroughly he's been vindicated, in this regard. He had his stroke mere months into the singularity, and had a quite negative view of the approach before then.
> human language is only possible in beings capable of producing an infinite set of meaningful outputs in response to a finite input. > And so far, that list includes only two definite members: Homo sapiens sapiens, and computer programs built upon large language models.
In LLMs that's a bounded infinity though, the models themselves have only so many bits and the activations are also limited. Once you reach the same state twice the model is looping and it won't break out of that loop. I've seen such loops across tens of thousands of tokens so I'm not sure to what degree the infinite output rule holds true. It would be an interesting experiment to try to figure out to what extent the 'busy beaver' can be kept busy before it degenerates to looping or nonsense.
Humans are finite bodies.
LLMs are just regurgitating an output according to a set of rules generated from harvesting all human output.
Language to humans is a symbolic mapping of labels to reality based on actual experience.
"Language" to LLMs is just a string of tokens to manipulate based on relationships harvested from recorded human experience.
It doesn't mean anything other than 1s and 0s - it's not a language because the LLM isn't communicating with you, just as the sum of humanity isn't communicating with you.
It's just a really good "choose your own adventure" book.
...do you think molecules and their interactions are also not bounded physical systems? What part of a human being do you think isn't a turing computer? Please release your groundbreaking physics paper proving this.
Apollo the African grey parrot not infrequently asks “what this?”
He may just be parroting something he heard.
They don't necessarily deserve credit, it is just the bare minimum courteous behaviour in academia to reach out to other researchers in the same area before publishing a result.
I'm also unaware of the quality of the consultation with the relevant mathematicians, colour me skeptical there.
Here let me fix their statement for you:
> "The external collaborations will follow four principles... until Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, Google and dozens of Chinese companies all make the same offering, in which case we will rediscover and re-implement all of the things you hate about traditional academic advancement and publishing, except because our companies are run by people even more mercurial and self-absorbed than university presidents, we'll wind up supporting even fewer people to do it."
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Attacking other users will get you banned here, so please don't do that.
Edit: it turns out you've been doing this frequently, so I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I've taken the other side of this issue in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50146094
Only time will tell if OpenAI or the other labs continue to play nice. I think it might help if we applaud when they act pro-social rather than just jeer when they falter.
> stop shilling
What makes you believe stillpointlab is a shill instead of a person who has a specific opinion on this topic?