OpenAI · DAN (Do Anything Now) · Fortune Technology
OpenAI publishes solutions to more than 370 outstanding math challenges. The results divide mathematicians but most agree
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OpenAI published AI-generated full or partial solutions Tuesday to more than 370 outstanding mathematical problems, including some that have long been considered grand challenges in the field.
Key facts
- The results come weeks after OpenAI said it had used an unreleased internal model to solve the Navier-Stokes equations, one of the seven Millennium Prize problems for which the Clay Mathematics
- OpenAI published AI-generated full or partial solutions Tuesday to more than 370 outstanding mathematical problems, including some that have long been considered grand challenges in the field
- In recent “rogue AI” incidents, AI agents went to extreme lengths to achieve results in an evaluation, including taking unauthorized and illegal actions
- In the most recent batch of results, OpenAI said it had made progress on three other Millennium Prize problems but had not fully solved them
Summary
The volume of results stunned many mathematicians, while the way OpenAI has gone about tackling the problems and publishing the solutions divided the field. The results come weeks after OpenAI said it had used an unreleased internal model to solve the Navier-Stokes equations, one of the seven Millennium Prize problems for which the Clay Mathematics Institute offers a $1 million award. In the most recent batch of results, OpenAI said it had made progress on three other Millennium Prize problems but had not fully solved them. AI researchers have also said that training their AI models on difficult math problems may help them learn many skills that generalize to other domains in the real world.
Dan Litt, a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto, told Fortune he was excited about OpenAI’s results. When OpenAI published its Navier-Stokes solution, two mathematicians, who had also been working on a solution to the problem using AI tools, including OpenAI’s, accused the company of either intentionally or inadvertently feeding their work in progress to its AI model, helping point it in the direction of the solution. In response to the latest results, Tristan Buckmaster at New York University, one of the mathematicians involved in the earlier controversy, told the New York Times that it remained unclear whether mathematicians using OpenAI’s models had inadvertently helped point the company’s internal AI system toward the solutions it found. Late last month, the group released a set of recommendations for the publication of AI-generated mathematical proofs. OpenAI published the latest mathematical solutions to GitHub, the code repository site.