woopsn

Yes since Zuck controls the board and negotiators he effectively dealt this outcome to himself, to large degree. Obviously "the shareholders" in a general sense have limited interest protecting the dual class structure.

My interpretation is they don't care about scooping mathematicians they were just trying to scoop a competitor. They had a short window in which to complicate Anthropic's priority, when Anthropic announced be able to say "ok nice but we did that too". Upon realizing they'd misunderstood, incredibly they said to this academic (who did not resolve NS) okay well just go ahead and claim the prize, so long as you're not Anthropic let's make this a good story.

If you spend $20M working out a Millennium Prize problem, in what universe would you offer that an unrelated effort should take credit? This is a branding game rather over whether software engineers are going to use codex or claude. In that light $20M (or whatever it was) might be worth it to squash even the rumor that claude code is more capable. Engineers look up to mathematics, while at the same time business and probably most engineers think the problem was to solve the problem. GPTs solved one the hardest known problems so they can solve my company's problem.

Some go further looking at these people, very on-the-nosely likened by one commenter here to ants, talking about education and responsibility and "core values" etc and just don't care. There was a major problem at the beginning of the week that is not a problem now and that is uncomplicated progress.

It's not wrong for OpenAI/Anthropic to do math for product development or even just branding but seemingly at no cost now they could work in an arena real mathematicians aren't interested in, versus just mowing the field. Everyone involved on their side should admit the purpose of these demonstrations is not to engage mathematical ideas it's about Claude/Codex. there's no shame in that. Which is better at solving random hard Diophantine systems? That would seem to tell me as much as I need to know insofar as a model's value is represented by raw mathematical power - then, take my money just as well!

Assuming the worst accusations are not true I think there are ways forward going to be acceptable for all. The labs themselves do not represent Terrance Tao as some kind of gate-keeping dinosaur in this. They're not interested, not the kind of entity that can care about theoretical mathematics. These dudes are paid 7-8 figure salaries ultimately for the product, they solve a Millennium Prize problem then pretty quickly seem to move past it.

I guess by their own account they were doing competitive analysis on the product and incidentally solved NS. Probably the two companies should agree to benchmark on random diophantine systems, which are harder and more applicable anyway. It wasn't "brute force" but they did spend $10-20M over the course of a few days based on a rumor, which is ... something. The fact they're not actually taking credit, and published no insights other than "it's a vortex" shows the company really has no business in mathematics. They're not interested (the guy said as much) and it obviously won't pay the bill - rather, they were able to pre-empt an announcement they thought Anthropic may have been preparing to make.

Big leaps in insight I don't think are received as elegant, generally. Fourier's contemporaries actually thought he was wrong (which he was), about both the series and heat equations, and even with the whole thing worked out it's not really straightforward. It fits into integral transforms/linear operators but in a way more complicated than can explained in those terms alone. Plus truncation error is commonly unbounded! Complex numbers and "fluxions" were also objectionable on their face although now one can frame them more or less elegantly.

> I could never imagine an LLM in its current form inventing something as elegant as the Fourier transform.

This is the crux imo. It doesn't really matter what absolute capability AI has at the moment, but whether we are on track with respect to architecture and training approaches. In my mind the only test for AGI is, if the thing trained up to the cut-off of Fourier's time (or Descartes, Newton etc), it should arrive at or exceed their insight.

^ As a measure of intelligence. But it's probably the case either way that LLM is more valuable in terms of the coordinated grunt work we'll put it to, than leaps of insight.

A proof may be impossible to fully grok, since about Leibniz - but problems will be solved now without even understanding the problem statement.

I don't disagree yet it's also clear "hard science fiction" is meaningless if it's just, the people in this universe wear clothing, make campfires etc.

I have great respect for her but this isn't the only essay she's jarringly defensive (imo) in response to a critic. Ok sure, a sock is "technology"...