Has AI reached a mathematical singularity?

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2:05>> So over the last two weeks, there's been this avalanche of news all over social media, news outlets about AI has now reached a singularity in mathematics. uh because we've seen sort of this release from OpenAI around this OpenAI Astra project where they had you know 10 solved open problems that they provided some work around and then that was quickly followed by uh Claude's progress on the Remon hypothesis and >> we what we wanted to do today is kind of get a background to understand why this is so important and then also So weed

2:48through the hype versus the sort of this is nothing new >> uh reaction to uh that particular result. >> Yeah, it's it's I think an incredible result. The reman hypothesis is the most important unsolved problem in mathematics. If you ask mathematicians, I think they will agree. If you ask um you know people adjacent to mathematics who have heard about the millennium problems and things like that this is the one right um to highlight that let me give you an example there was a famous interview with Jim Simons who's the famous mathematician behind churn Simons theory but I think everyone else knows him as the creator of the hedge

3:28fund Renaissance Technologies that has the medallion fund which mysteriously just prints money um I think their worst year ever was 20% that was or worst year in the past like 30 years. Usually they do like 100%. Like 40%, 70%. Unbelievable. >> Um he was he was $30 billion rich. He was worth $30 billion when he died. Um and he was asked in this interview, >> if you could trade your wealth for solving the Remon hypothesis, would you do it? And you could see him just perk up and he was like, oh that's that's a good question. And then he like sort of stares off into the distance and starts like fantasizing about solving the Remon

4:08hypothesis. And then he later on he he like goes back to the scripted, oh, you know, my life has been great. Um, you can't choose how your life ends up. Uh, you know, no regrets. # no regrets. But you could behind it all, you could tell >> it was it was a yes. >> This is a man who was who was like, I I if I could have done that, I >> I would have done it. >> That would have that would have been sick, right? So given the aura around the remon hypothesis, it has become the gold standard around which AI's mathematical capability is judged. And we see this actually in our own comment section, okay? Whenever we talk about like AI doing math and doing crazy

4:50things, like when we covered the Jacobian conjecture not too long ago, a lot of people in the comments are just like, "Well, wake me up when they solve the Remon hypothesis, right? as if like this unattainable thing is going to be like how we judge AI something that humans haven't been able to do for like 300 n 200 years right >> so now it's made some progress it hasn't solved it and I want to be clear AI has not solved the remon hypothesis and by some measures it is still as open as it once was >> but the fact that it has made progress is I think pretty crazy I particularly there's this interesting dichotomy

5:32between sort of two factions as it relates to AI progress. There are there's one faction that says it fundamentally was not going to make any meaningful progress that matters. >> And there's the other faction that's just saying it's a matter of time. >> The upfront is usually somewhere in the middle. Yes. >> And it's this seems like it's somewhere in the middle. >> Exactly. It seems there and and the way that it's done it I think is very very cool. So for this episode, at least for this segment, I wanted to cover it because one, I really like the Remon hypothesis. I think it's a very cool thing to think about. Um, and two, it's a really nice case study in how AI has progressed from the initial chat bots that we were thinking about, you know, back when chatbt came online and

6:14everybody was talking about it to now there's this agentic version of AI and there's an orchestrated agentic version where AI can now command other AI, right? It's this really cool world that we're now living in. Cool/ a [snorts] little weird. Um, and that is central to this story. I want to briefly pause by identifying this has always been an argument that's brought up which is sort of this difference between people viewing the word there's lack of definition right so AI a lot of the perception is that's pure LLM >> and the systems that are now being used particularly inside the frontier labs as well as uh for consumers

6:57have a variety of capabilities around the next token prediction piece that make it more than just predicting the next token. >> Exactly. Exactly. And that's that's that's going to be the highlight of this story is is what they're capable of. So, Anthropic actually put out a description of this finding on their website. But what's really cool is they also shared Claude's own account of how it got there and they shared a full transcript of one