OpenAI AI 或已解决纳维-斯托克斯存在性与光滑性难题
The Equation That Might Destroy Itself
若证实属实,这是 AI 在基础科学领域里程碑式的突破,直接展示了大模型在复杂数学证明上的能力跃迁,值得所有关注 AI 前沿能力的从业者关注。
I did not think I would live to see the day when this mathematical problem gets solved and I just did likely. So I am kind of sitting here in disbelief something that nobody has ever been able to prove. The Navier Stokes existence and smoothness problem has been very likely solved. Open AAI says this is history in the making and there is going to be one even bigger surprise at the end. I will note that I have no relationship of any kind with OpenAI.
Never had. They don't even send me things for early access and they send out a lot of those. Not for me. Now there is controversy. I am a research scientist and this is very uncomfortable for me but I have to make note about it because it is external context for the work that you should know about. Then we talk about the part that almost nobody is talking about. So two scientists had made meaningful progress on a related problem and according to legendary mathematician Terren Tao they got to the point where their solution could likely be extended to solve Navier Stokes and then after hearing the rumors open AI fired up an AI system that is more powerful than Astra that came up with a solution.
Whoa. Now this is two minute papers where we celebrate science and scientists and I do not know what kind of attribution these two scientists outside open AI will be given. So as a thank you for their work here is our attribution to them and I also want to say a big thank you for their work. One more note, these scientists also used proprietary LLMs like Chad GPT and Claude extensively and they were looking for verification that OpenAI did not reuse this data in their systems as training data or otherwise.
And to this here's the answer one sentence officially from OpenAI. While unlikely, we cannot rule out that the identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models. Yes, whatever you enter in a chat box for a proprietary AI can be used for training. I keep saying this over and over again that this cannot happen if you run free and open weights AI systems yourself. Why? Because the prompts never leave your machine.
Okay, Na'vi Stokes. Finally, I get to talk about science. I am not an expert on this. I am just a student but I have a little experience in this area as I did a few years of research and wrote my thesis in this area. Now what are the Navier Stokes equations? These are equations that describe fluid motion. But what I mean that sounds crazy. Look at this absolutely beautiful nature footage. I remember looking at this and saying, "You want to understand and compute this?
Are you crazy? This is unfathomably complex." Well, it turns out with the power of science, it isn't. The Navier Stokes equations teach us that you just need to understand three terms and you understand all of this. First, adection. This is the heart and the bane of every fluid simulation. Here's the good news. If you drop an object into a river, it will follow the flow. Goodbye. This is advection. Bad news. The fluid also advects itself too.
This is described with the directional derivative in the first term. Second ingredient, pressure. Yummy. It's a bit like people on the bus where there are a lot of people. There is a lot of pushing each other which starts outwards movement. Third ingredient, diffusion. ah crowd favorite. This means that differences average out over time. If you add a drop of ink into water, you immediately see where it is, of course.
However, if you come back in a few minutes, you see that it has spread perfectly and the whole glass of liquid is now the same color. That is diffusion. Also, the liquid reacts to external forces. If you blow on it, it moves. Of course it does. Done with a beautiful simple addition. I did not count this as a term. You also need to add a second equation. The incompressibility condition that says that volume remains constant over time.
We don't lose or add liquid out of thin air. And what I love to do is to discretise this kind of equation onto a grid. And these expressions are very simple to evaluate on a grid. For instance, advection means that you take some fluid density out from where you are and add it to the appropriate neighbor. Diffusion means averaging. So simple. With this, you can write a computer program that kind of simulates reality. That is mindblowing.
Fun liquid simulations. Yes, please. Wind tunnel tests for a new aircraft. Yes, please. Caro writing up crazy simulations to control the fluids of the world. Yes, please. You can write a simulation like that too. My source code for all my research is always available free of charge for everyone with the papers too. Links in the video description. Okay. So, what is the question to be solved here? Well, the question is if you start with a smooth fluid flow and run these equations forever, does the mathematics eventually break down?
Dear fellow scholars, this is two minute papers with Dr. Koja and I am happy to report to you fellow scholars that the answer is not 42 as some of you say. The milliondoll answer is yes. The mathematics can break down. The equations are not guaranteed to behave nicely forever. Open AAI starts the solution from rest and uses carefully created external forces. You see, if you create a vortex that spirals inward, stretches, and its velocity grows without bound within a finite amount of time while its total amount of energy remains finite, then the mathematics breaks down.
So there are mathematical cases that are hairy. Does this happen in mother nature? Well, not that we know of. If it did, molecular level physics would take over. Don't use Navier Stokes for that. And once again, I am just a student who is trying to learn here. I may be wrong, but I am trying my best. Now, another surprise. How long did it take OpenAI's model to find out? Have they been running it for a year or longer in stealth?
Nope. Now, hold on to your papers, fellow scholars, because it took about three and a half days. Goodness. And one more thing, people don't really understand why AI is so good at math. Let's look at pros. If you ask an AI to write an article in your style, so it does. What do you do? You read it and evaluate it by hand. Was it good or was it not? Well, you read it and evaluate maybe a hundred of those per hour. But with mathematics, not so much.
Math is verifiable. That is the key. You can check if it's good or not automatically. So you can do it a 100 million times per hour. 100 lessons versus 100 million lessons per hour. There is a big difference. This is why AI is improving incredibly quickly at mathematics and it will keep getting a heck of a lot better than this which is hard to imagine but likely true. And since AI is getting so powerful, I believe we need a heck of a lot more coordination for safety and alignment.
Also, when Nobel laurate Sir Demi Hassabis tells me that we could cure all disease in 10 years, then I fall off the chair. Why and how? Well, at the risk of extending his argument, well, let's make disease a verifiable problem like mathematics. If we can do that, we might be able to cure all disease in 10 years. What a time to be alive. All right, subscribe and hit the bell if you like this. A lot more is coming. I use Lambda to reproduce AI research papers often in minutes.
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