LLMs

A few days ago the mathematician Tristan Buckmaster, of NYU’s Courant Institute, published a statement about a result he and Levent Alpöge had spent roughly a year chasing: finite-time blowup for several equations in fluid dynamics, the kind of problem that sits next to a Clay Millennium Prize. Through the whole project they state they worked with LLMs, including OpenAI’s Codex, and they put every draft into their Codex sessions as they went. Then a rumor started that someone had cracked a major open problem. Buckmaster was told an internal OpenAI model had produced a competing proof, around 100 pages, on[…]