Seems like a very tin-foil-hat-take to me

I’m quite certain that a few months ago, some problems were claimed to be solved by AI. However, those claims were actually false and were exactly that, solved erdos problems that were not marked as solved and the solution was "found" by AI.

edit: >> https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/19/openais-embarrassing-math/

	▲	jiggawatts 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The corollary is that this is a very valuable capability of AI! The ability to find incredibly obscure facts and recall them to solve "officially unsolved" problems in minutes is like Google Search on steroids. In some sense, it is one core component of "deep expertise", and humans rely on the same methodology regularly to solve "hard" problems. Many mathematicians have said that they all just use a "bag of tricks" they've picked up and apply them to problems to see if they work. The LLMs have a huge bag of very obscure tricks, and are starting to reach the point that they can effectively apply them also. I suspect the threshold of AGI will be crossed when the AIs can invent novel "tricks" on their own, and memorise their own new approach for future use without explicitly having to have their weights updated with "offline" training runs.

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mrdependable 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How is that a "tin-foil-hat" take? It's not a secret, and in fact widely reported, that these companies are spending billions on creating training data.

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dmix 2 hours ago | parent [-]

So you think that OpenAI paid some mathematicians to either solve this conjecture problem, or a bunch of related unpublished math related to it, then fed it into an LLM model so they could announce it as being solved by the model? How is that not a conspiracy theory?

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mrdependable an hour ago | parent [-]

It is just a theory, the conspiracy part is not really applicable. I don't see what is controversial about it. Are you implying the machine taught itself the mathematics to do all this?

	▲	dmix 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Are you implying the machine taught itself the mathematics to do all this? Are you asking me how LLMs work? The theory proposed by the original commenter was that there could have been some secret training data the model was trained on that made it possible to solve this problem set. So the only conclusion is they are implying it's a conspiracy by OpenAI to hide some novel math research they funded merely to do marketing about solving math problems (then convincing multiple math experts to verify and support it with papers). That is the definition of a conspiracy.

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recitedropper 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not letting the government read my brainwaves.

In all seriousness though: My suggestion is that those shepherding the frontier of AI start acting with more transparency, and stop acting in ways that encourage conspiratorial thinking. Especially if the technology is as powerful as they market it as.