Lab Notes: The AI maths wars
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What is the AI maths war and why is it happening?
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AI is changing different sectors in different ways. Some of us are still sceptical about whether we want all that change, whether it's worth the cost, whether there's a bubble. But in the world of maths, it's changing everything and things are starting to get nasty. This is Lab Notes from ABC Radio National. I'm Jonathan Webb, and today I'm digging into the AI maths wars with the ABC's national AI reporter, Cam Wilson. Thanks so much for coming in for a chat,
Cam. Hey, good to be here. Just want to note that I'm not the national maths reporter, so any toes that I step on, I'm very, very sorry. An
AI guy, not a maths guy. But this story is very much about both. A few months ago on Lab Notes, we covered some of the progress that AI was making in maths. We spoke to mathematician Melissa Lee. Since then, the area's only got bigger, the temperature's gone up, and last week, OpenAI took it up another level. What was their very big claim, Cam?
Yes, so OpenAI, which is one of the leading AI companies, announced that it believed it had a solution to one of the Millennium Prize problems. For those of you who don't have those on your fridge, those are one of seven extremely difficult and consequential mathematic problems that come with a million-dollar prize for coming up with a proof. They said that they had essentially... been working on it for not that long, not much more than a week or two, that they had thrown a lot of its AI, a lot of its computing power at one of the problems, at Navier-Stokes problems, which is kind of about the understanding of a proof that is about predicting and understanding how fluids move. That is about as deep as I went on it.
Fluid mechanics is a famously complicated area of math. The way fluids move around is intricate and very hard to predict and model. And yeah, the Navier-Stokes thing is some... Like, people use it every day, but they have to use it approximately. And I think this proof is about trying to nail it down.
Exactly, yeah. And, like, you know, these things are actually consequential because, you know, fluid mechanics and stuff is affecting all kinds of things when you've got to, I guess, like, transport fluids and all these... Transport fluids, model of climate. All that stuff. So, very, very important. And coming up with a solution to this would take it from something that I kind of approximate to something that becomes more specific. So, great to be able to kind of predict these
things better. And even in their announcement... It seemed a little bit, I don't know, like they were just big footing something, right? They said, this was on Tuesday, the 1st of September, we heard rumors that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved. Inspired by these rumors and by basically how good our models are now, we deployed 10,000 AI agents over about 88 hours and just basically got the biggest hammer possible to hit the nail with.
I know. It's very dilettante being like, you know what? I heard you guys had this little math thing you're working on. So I thought, why not? We got out the legal pad, you know, poured a couple cups of coffee for us and our machines and set it out. And for those people not familiar, like the big breakthrough in the last year or so is what's known as agentic AI. You heard that 10,000 agents before. This is essentially AI. AI talking to itself over and over so it can go and, you know, continue trains of thought. I'm anthropomorphizing this, but essentially it can spend longer thinking about things. They set a lot of different bots thinking about things and said they kind of came up with a solution.
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