I’m a bit surprised OpenAI isn’t finding these big results far faster than the product’s user base. With no limits on runtime, access to dev models, custom tuning, and top talent, you’d think there’d be a constantly running internal project with the goal of solving famous math problems. And who knows, perhaps there is, but it would be interesting to compare the rate of success per unit “effort” of the internal mathematics work with that of the user base.

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pdpi 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"OpenAI's internal team solves famous maths problem" is technically impressive but dispiriting. Non-experts solving a problem by just throwing resources at it is kind of the worst possible optics for knowledge workers. It's just disempowering.

"Famous mathematician uses ChatGPT to solve famous math problem" is equally technically impressive, but now you're telling those very same knowledge workers "that famous mathematician could've been you". It puts you in the driver's seat, and provides a clear path forward — subscribe, use our product, and reap the rewards.

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rlt 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Then they should give grants of tokens to famous mathematicians.

EDIT: oh, they do offer grants of $1000 of API credits to researchers https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10139500-researcher-acce...

	▲	eru 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Then they should give grants of tokens to famous mathematicians. Depends. The headline 'some rando solved a famous problem with a consumer grade subscription' might be a really good way to sell these subscriptions. "Some already famous guy with special access solved a problem" might not be as inspiring.
	▲	TychoCelchuuu 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

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tyre 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't think they care if it's disempowering. They'd gain more in market share by indicating that this is God than missing out on a few subscriptions from math theory people.

My guess is they don't do this because they don't have time. They're all trying to build a company that makes them generationally wealthy before the music stops.

	▲	qsera 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Why would they want to do it when the people paying them would do the same for them?

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staticshock 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You're surprised they didn't eat the tokens to churn on lots of open problems instead of asking others to pay for those tokens? They're in the token business. If they're eating the tokens, it's in support of a marketing effort, not in support of innovation across the frontier of all the other academic disciplines. The collective frontier is way too big for them to just "solve it" without asking society to at least help them break even on such an enormous public good.

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vatsachak 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How could they?

That's why the free market works, millions of agents in parallel beats any planned economy (by humans)

	▲	eru 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The free market is mostly the glue that binds lots of tiny and not so tiny planned economies together. (I mean companies and even family budgets.)

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ivewonyoung 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They do have some of those.

https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-c...

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gaigalas 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Confirmation bias. There's likely a wide portion of chats in which "keep going" derails to madness. We then stop saying "keep going" because we notice there is something wrong, and we start another chat. In the end, we largely remember much better the interactions in which "keep going" resulted in something good, and forget about our role in stopping the train when it derails, which is something much harder to do unattended by a human.