OpenAI says it has found a solution to a decades-old advanced maths problem in a matter of hours using a new artificial intelligence (AI) model and thousands of AI bots.
The report indicates that openAI says it has found a solution to a decades-old advanced maths problem in a matter of hours using a new artificial intelligence (AI) model and thousands of AI bots.
It further notes that the ChatGPT maker stated on Tuesday that by focusing a group of roughly 10,000 AI agents, or AI bots that undertake tasks somewhat autonomously, it solved a notoriously difficult maths problem in just 88 hours.
The problem was part of the Navier-Stokes equations, which concern how fluids move. For 90 years, important aspects of the problem have lacked a proof, the argument underlying a correct mathematical equation.
OpenAI called the solution it found a “milestone” and evidence that AI tools are improving quickly.
OpenAI’s solution has yet to be independently verified or publicly accepted by The Clay Mathematics Institute, a maths organisation based in the US that runs the Millennium Prize, which offers big money to the first to solve certain mathematical conundrums.
The company stated that at the end of August, it began training a new model that quickly proved adept at maths. AI models are computer programs trained on huge amounts of data to recognise and predict patterns in information.
While the new OpenAI model remains a tool only used within the company, as it is “significantly more capable” than the company’s most recent AI model release, its researchers decided to use it on certain notable advanced maths problems.
OpenAI admitted that last week, on 1 September, it had “heard rumours that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved” and so decided to put thousands of AI bots trained on the new internal model to work on solving some of the remaining problems.
By Sept 5, or roughly 88 hours after it had set 10,000 AI bots to the task, OpenAI had found a solution to what’s referred to as the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem.
The problem lies at the heart of turbulence, a phenomenon that remains poorly understood.
Although it took the AI bots seemingly little time to reach a solution, OpenAI stated the bots exchanged nearly 3 million messages and used up 130 billion output tokens, or the individual lines of text and code an AI model produces in answers, on Navier–Stokes alone.
Such an effort would have cost roughly $10m (£7.3m), based on OpenAI’s own pricing for output from its most advanced models.
The solution that OpenAI says it has now reached for the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem resolved two out of the four statements in the proof that the Millennium Prize had demanded. The prize is worth $1m to a winner.
“Our goal in releasing this result is to report on the substantial progress of our AI models”, OpenAI stated on Tuesday. “We do not intend to claim the Millennium Prize for this result.”
