> ... we heard rumors that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved. Inspired by these rumors ...

I've observed this exact effect last week. I made a discovery regarding a stepwise performance improvement in a codebase. I shared the benchmark results with a peer and within 12 hours they replicated the same. We had both been looking for this for years.

I think giving someone hope that an answer exists might as well be the same thing as giving them the answer these days. Competition is a hell of a drug, and frontier LLMs aggressively compound that energy.

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sodic an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I have a similar story, but perhaps even stranger.

I work for a startup. We often bring a wooden arcade with us to conferences as a marketing gimmick.

The arcade runs a single side-scrolling video game. You're running from a monster and dodging obstacles. The goal is to survive as long as possible, and your result is measured in meters.

There are always a few competitive guys who spend the entire conference taking turns to play it. And every single time, the same thing happens.

Say the current high score is around 200m. Everybody fails somewhere around that number: 190m, 186m... Maybe someone manages 210m. And the high score moves up at a snail's pace.

Then, a new guy shows up and gets something like 500m on his third try. From their next turn on, everybody easily does 450 or more, even though they were struggling to get past 200 just one turn ago.

What makes it stranger is that the game is dead simple. It's not like the new guy discovered a move that unlocked this capability. And it wasn't a lack of motivation either - they'd all been playing for an hour already. They just started performing better after seeing it was possible. There has to be a name for this phenomenon.

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aswegs8 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Reminds me of amateur table tennis. There is a strange dynamic where you down regulate your performance unconsciously when the opponent is playing worse and vice versa.

Could be described as some physical form of this effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

The term would be conformity / normative social influence.

	▲	Mawr 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Surely this has nothing to do with specifically table tennis, nor that it's amateur. A better example would be mixed boys/girls sports classes in school, where the boys deliberately hold back as to not injure/scare the girls. It's a pretty obvious and human thing not to go out and completely destroy a much weaker opponent. We're social animals after all. There also may be an element of energy conservation, there's objectively no need to put in any more effort than necessary. Inefficient.

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KeplerBoy an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder if it's the same with the sub 2 hour marathon which was broken this year (it certainly was with the 4 minute mile).

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suls 40 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Reference-dependent effort ("bunching" around a target) [1] is probably the closest thing. The existing high score was acting as everyone's reference point. Anchoring [2] is the more general cognitive version.

[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w20343/w203... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect

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skylurk 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I think giving someone hope that an answer exists might as well be the same thing as giving them the answer these days.

If you read the history of major scientific discoveries, this has been the case for a long time. There are many things that were independently discovered by different people at nearly the same time. Once people know something is solved or solvable, it gets a relentless amount of focus.

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teiferer 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe that shows how scientific discoveries come to be. It's not a genius sitting alone in their chamber for a decade and then suddenly they emerge with this huge thing. That's Hollywood fiction. Scientific progress is the colaborative effort of countless researchers over long periods of time, communicating, exchanging ideas, many of them wrong, tweaking, trying, thinking, arguing. When a breakthrough happens then it's the tip of a mountain of work that came before it. If two individuals stand on that mountain and feel there is something somewhere then it's not too strange that they take the last step at roughly the same time because conditions were right. The preconditions were in place at that time, the results required for this were available and the focus was on this specific thing.

I'd say it illustrates well that this last piece, the person celebrated for the achievement, is disproportionally overvalued and the rest of the work they are standing on is disproportionally ignored.

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a_bonobo 2 hours ago | parent [-]

This ties back into AI, too, right?

I always like to bring up how many decades of research, how many hundreds of years of entire PhD-theses, how many sleepless nights were used up to generate all the protein structure data that made up the corpus of Protein Data Bank - that was then hovered up by the AlphaFold team, and guess who got the Nobel Prize...

	▲	teiferer an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Just like all non-AI related nobel prizes before them. Every laureate stands on the shoulder of giants which is their field as a generations-spanning body of researchers. They did the last step and get recognized. The good ones acknowledge that in their acceptance speeches.

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eru 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This seems to be the norm rather than the exception.

On a tangent, the genius of people like eg Einstein is not so much that he came up with all these things: other people were close, but that he was a singular individual that did all of these discoveries, instead of five different guys all making some breakthrough here or there.

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adg33 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's something that happened before LLMs - multiple discovery. Calculus is a classic example.

	▲	jansport123 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes but in this case, the allegation is Leibniz literally looked into newtons notebooks

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pred_ an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's the other thing. Even if it somehow magically turns out that they didn't plagiarize Buckmaster and Alpöge, that an independent audit goes through all their processes and finds that they could not possibly have stolen anything, and ignoring their outrageous attempts to force a coauthor off the author list, and ignoring that their employees act like small children on social media, this is a company whose culture is “we heard of a breakthrough being possible, let's scoop it”.

Normally, when you tell a coworker that you're wrapping up a result, unless they're some kind of sociopath, their natural inclination would not be to try to steal it from you.

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avs733 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you believe the totality of the document, there was more shadiness in how OpenAI acted than just timing. Save other things they are accused of, the progression from rumors to replication would attract much less scrutiny. With those in mind timing begins to look suspicious at best.

Would anyone be surprised if major model companies had tagged the accounts of competitor employees for extra tracking? Given the concerns about distillation and bench marking it hardly seems irrational, but how it is used matters quite a lot.