OPENAI ANNOUNCES THREE RESEARCH CLAIMS

OpenAI says its AI models have produced new results in mathematics, computer science and physics. It has published the mathematics and computer science materials on GitHub for researchers to examine. External groups of experts will examine and explain the computer science and physics results, the company says. OpenAI has left publication of the physics materials to the group assessing them. The announcement follows an earlier October release in which OpenAI presented more than 700 pages of material concerning 372 mathematics problems.

The new mathematics manuscript claims to establish Sogge’s local smoothing conjecture for waves in every spatial dimension of at least two. A second manuscript claims to disprove the Exponential Time Hypothesis, a widely held assumption about how quickly certain computing problems can be solved. OpenAI says that proof presents an algorithm for counting solutions to fixed-width formulas in subexponential time. Russell Impagliazzo, Ramamohan Paturi and Ryan Williams lead the group examining the computer science work; Impagliazzo and Paturi proposed the hypothesis. The physics claim concerns interacting quantum field theories with gauge fields and fermions in four dimensions.

The group examining the physics claim has provided an email address for questions but has not published its assessment. OpenAI says it will not seek academic credit for the claimed discoveries and that the experts will receive credit for the materials they produce. Its AGMAI panel of mathematics advisers has raised concerns about giving selected researchers early access to AI output, citing unequal access and possible bias in the selection. OpenAI has invited feedback “on how to broaden participation and make this process more useful.” Researchers can examine the published manuscripts while the expert groups work through the remaining claims.