The big AI companies spend millions on some of these proofs (15M was one estimate for the Naiver-Stokes thing). Had anyone has spent millions on them before this? There was a 1M prize but that certainly wouldn't convince anyone to spend orders of magnitude more to solve the problem.
Meanwhile the three letter agencies are spending billions on cryptography. They have programs that recruit students starting in high school. So maybe they are sending the spooks to suppress OpenAI's cryptography breakthroughs, or maybe they just already outspent them.
That to me is the point that isn't getting enough attention: pure math isn't that well funded. I agree as much as anyone that these proofs are an unprecedented breakthrough for LLMs, but let's keep in mind that the money they are throwing around is also unprecedented.
[–] Davidzheng 2 days ago
[–] dguest 1 day ago
I'm not trying to argue there is a single cause, either (sorry if my either-or phrasing implied that). I think attributing any general feature of an academic discipline to a single cause would be missing a dozen other contributing factors.
Of course three letter agencies are watching this carefully, and I'd believe they were weighing in somehow, as they have in cryptography in the past. My point was that we shouldn't ignore the overall sparsity of funding in pure math and science projects. A lot of (probably most) contributors to bleeding-edge research have a number of other jobs in their position.