OpenAI Announces New Results in Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics

For the math results, OpenAI published the findings so researchers can look them up and try to explain them. For computer science and physics, it formed external groups of expert collaborators. OpenAI asked the computer science group to explain the results in its own writeups and materials and also released the AI output publicly. It deferred release of the physics materials to the group handling them. OpenAI said it welcomes feedback “on how to broaden participation and make this process more useful.”

OpenAI added two manuscripts on GitHub. One establishes Sogge’s local smoothing for waves in every spatial dimension, a conjecture about the behavior of solutions to the wave equation. The other shows proof that the Exponential Time Hypothesis is false. ETH is an assumption in computer science that some problems are too hard to solve quickly.

According to OpenAI, ETH is widely believed to be true and has been the basis for hundreds of papers in fields including databases, computational biology and geometry. If it is false, researchers could in theory find better algorithms to solve problems in those fields more efficiently. The scientists who proposed ETH are now part of the group OpenAI asked to examine and explain its models’ results.

The physics results involve proof of interacting quantum field theories containing gauge fields and fermions in four dimensions. The group examining those results has not published anything about them, but it provided an email, YANGMILLS4D@gmail.com, for questions about its efforts.

OpenAI said people in each group will receive credit for the writeups and materials they create. The groups will also be responsible for ensuring that AI-generated results appropriately credit all the researchers, techniques and ideas the company’s models drew on.