Comment by xigoi
19 hours ago
Is there any evidence that the discovery was made by Claude and not by Levent Alpöge himself? The only sources listed in the wikipedia article are an X post and a news article that references the post.
19 hours ago
Is there any evidence that the discovery was made by Claude and not by Levent Alpöge himself? The only sources listed in the wikipedia article are an X post and a news article that references the post.
You think Alpoge just had the solution for the Jacobian Conjecture in his back pocket, just sort of waiting to deploy at his next gig?
He could have been paid by Anthropic to run a brute-force computer search. The counterexample looks short enough that, given a portion of Anthropic’s computing power and a sufficiently smart algorithm, it could be found by brute force.
Is your premise here that no other mathematician was ever equipped or motivated to do a "brute-force computer search"? Or is it instead that you think Anthropic dedicated an entire data center's worth of compute to the task of speculatively trying to disprove a conjecture that has stood for over 80 years?
This is a very well studied problem. Well-known mathematicians have spent a lot of effort on it - Yitang Zhang wrote his entire PhD thesis on it back in 1991.
It is deeply unlikely that a random guy at Anthropic just happened to solve it so they could pass it off as the LLM's work.