Sam Wikeley
speaker
111 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 6d ago
Sam Wikeley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
They don't seem to have gone that well, and they led to the mathematician publishing his work
with Levant Elpoge early and in unfinished form online before OpenAI's announcement.
Now, mathematicians, while certainly excited about having a solution to this, are saying that the OpenAI paper that outlines their solution is not going into the type or level of detail that one would usually expect in a mathematics paper into how they arrived at the solution.
And certainly the kind of fanfare around this is about a solution being found, but not the insights that were necessary to get to that solution.
This is slightly different to what mathematicians want from work.
They're not doing it to just tick a box of a final solution.
They want new mathematical insights to be generated along the way.
But I think the real question that mathematicians want open AI to answer
is not about the solution itself, but it is about how the solution was landed upon.
What was needed to get to this solution?
Because usually that is where the interesting mathematics lies.
Yeah, it raises some very deep questions about what the purpose of mathematics is in the first place.
And it is true that mathematicians have been working on this Navier-Stokes problem for a long time and have generated many new insights along the way.
So if OpenAI comes in at the final moment and lands on a solution, there is a question of who deserves the credit, but there's also a question of
What this is really good for?
What have we learned from this new solution that the AI agents have come up with?
And will this result lead to spinoffs of new fields of research, new interesting questions to investigate?
There is also quite a difficult question behind all of this, which is whether the mathematician's work may have unintentionally, inadvertently snuck into the training data that OpenAI used to build their latest model.
They were making use of OpenAI's products and OpenAI have been unable to rule out this as a possibility.
What we can say is that
Showing 41–60 of 111 · page 3 of 6
← Previous
Next →