futureshock
Joined 11 years ago
Joined 11 years ago
First of all, there has been published work from Diego Cordoba and Luis Martinez-Zoroa that will be in every training set. It was suggestive of the pathway to solve Navier-Stokes.
Then Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpoge built on this work using LLMs from OpenAI and Anthropic. Possibly internal models were used from Anthropic. And of course Anthropic wants to credit for solving the first Millennium Problem just as bad as OpenAI. It seems they were getting close and were aware that they might get to Navier-Stokes.
OpenAI swoops in. At a minimum they are aware that Anthropic has either solved a Millennium problem or is close to it. At a maximum they may have Tristan and Levant’s unpublished proofs of related problems.
They then throw a truly staggering amount of compute at Navier-Stokes. They seem to be aware it is the best candidate problem. And they crack it. They are the first with a verified proof.
So the outcome here is that we have a solved Millennium Problem. It’s not the extremely simple narrative that would be easy to understand, “solve Navier-Stokes make no mistakes.” It was a messy race to finish against two unpublished frontier models, a whole bunch of brilliant mathematicians and enough compute to drain a lake. It’s kind of irrelevant which company got there first. They were both within a few months of being capable. I think the thing to remember here is that without LLMs, I don’t think we would have a proof to Navier-Stokes in hand today.
But you are sensing correctly that there’s something missing. It’s the meaning and the speaker. Communication is an exchange between speaker and listener. The speaker has a meaning in mind, and wants to create that same meaning in the mind of the listener. Therein the problem.
There is a listener, sure. But no speaker. No meaning. There is information, but how can this be communication? Nothing is talking. Or at best, we are just talking to ourselves, our own words back at us through the funhouse mirror.
When your mind looks at AI text, you know you can safely ignore it. No one wrote this. No one cares if you read it. You can delete it and nothing of value will be lost. It might contain the information you need, or a bunch of gibberish. There’s no one’s reputation on the line if it’s gibberish.
I would say I'm quite a power user usually. I very carefully explored every feature my apple watch has and tried to incorporate as many of them as I could. Very, very few features stuck because they were genuinely helpful. Almost everything being pushed is a gimmick or a feature bullet point from some product manager.
The actual good stuff:
Time
Workouts
Payments
The occasionally useful stuff:
Notifications
Noise DB levels to see if I need to put on ear protection
Workoutdoors app for on-device maps and path breadcrumbs
The once in a blue moon stuff:
Music controls and on device playlists
On device audiobooks
Weather complication
Voice memos
Alarm
Shortcut to call my husband
The feature I tried to get working but gave up on: Tap to talk to ChatGPT and get a 100 word or less reply
I was sure this would eventually turn into something. I naturally wanted to converse with it as a chatbot, though it could only stay on task for a few turns. RL and guardrails would come later but it was clearly the foundational step towards AGI for me. From something I thought I would never see in my lifetime to very real and in front of me.
ChatGPT didn't even really rock my world, everything since that moment has been another baby step. But when you take a look back from 2026 models to 2020 it's astounding how far and how fast we've come.