OpenAI has claimed a further advance in AI reasoning after its technology successfully tackled an 80-year-old maths problem.<\/p>\n
The company behind ChatGPT said it had made a breakthrough<\/a> with a challenge first posed by Hungarian mathematician Paul Erd\u0151s in 1946: the planar unit distance problem.<\/p>\n The question posed by Erd\u0151s is simple to explain. If you take a sheet of paper and add some dots, how many pairs can be the same distance apart? Erd\u0151s proposed the number would rise only slightly faster than the number of dots themselves.<\/p>\n OpenAI\u2019s model concluded otherwise by drawing on different branches of mathematics to uncover a family of arrangements that break the limit in Erd\u0151s\u2019s conjecture.<\/p>\n \u201cFor nearly 80 years, mathematicians believed the best possible solutions looked roughly like square grids,\u201d OpenAI wrote on X. \u201cAn OpenAI model has now disproved that belief, discovering an entirely new family of constructions that performs better.\u201d<\/p>\n While the work has excited mathematicians, the broader problem remains unsolved because the AI did not come up with a new answer for how fast the pairs of dots rise, but merely showed that the limit Erd\u0151s proposed was too low.<\/p>\n OpenAI, which is preparing to float on the US stock market, said the calculations had been made by a general-purpose reasoning model \u2013 which breaks down problems into smaller steps \u2013 rather than a system trained specifically for mathematics.<\/p>\n The startup has been tripped up before by its attempts to solve Erd\u0151s\u2019s problems, having hailed a supposed breakthrough last year that was in fact based on already existing literature absorbed by the model. This time, OpenAI\u2019s work has been validated by mathematicians, including Thomas Bloom, a mathematician who maintains the Erd\u0151s problems<\/a> website and criticised OpenAI\u2019s prior Erd\u0151s claims.<\/p>\n Bloom co-authored a companion paper to OpenAI\u2019s blog post flagging the Erd\u0151s achievement. Bloom wrote that the AI system had attained its results by \u201cpersevering down paths that a human may have dismissed as not worth their time to explore\u201d.<\/p>\n However, he added that humans had been involved in the AI\u2019s work.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile the original proof produced by AI was completely valid, it was significantly improved by the human researchers at OpenAI and the many other mathematicians involved in the present paper. The human still plays a vital role in discussing, digesting and improving this proof, and exploring its consequences,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n Mathematician Tim Gowers, also writing in the companion paper, described the result as \u201ca milestone in AI mathematics\u201d.<\/p>\n Andrew Rogoyski, of the Institute for People-Centred AI at the University of Surrey, said the announcement showed AIs were giving humans new ways to look at problems.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s becoming clear that AI is impacting the world of creative thought and will become a fundamental tool of future scientific research,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OpenAI has claimed a further advance in AI reasoning after its technology successfully tackled an 80-year-old maths problem.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":685804,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-685803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685803\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/685804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}