Comment by john_strinlai
6 hours ago
>The idea that an AI company is beyond peer review is harmful.
i havent seen this sentiment expressed anywhere, have you?
isn't this comment chain on a submission about openai's claims being reviewed?
6 hours ago
>The idea that an AI company is beyond peer review is harmful.
i havent seen this sentiment expressed anywhere, have you?
isn't this comment chain on a submission about openai's claims being reviewed?
OpenAI has expressed this sentiment by not submitting to or saying they will submit their results to peer reviewed journals.
I would say it's released in the spirit of open source. "Peer review" in the narrow sense exists primarily to assign prestige in academia; but there's nothing stopping anyone from "peer reviewing" the GitHub repository.
I would say it's released in the spirit of machine learning's competitive landscape (which is the culture this emerged from).
1 reply →
What kind of prestige? Peer review is anonymous unpaid work.
A good review does not merely check the correctness of logical arguments, it gives suggestions for the exposition, citing the correct references, putting everything in the right context, etc.
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This is an equivalent of a company producing security software, open sourcing their code, and then claiming that since no one has found any serious bugs, their software is secure.
No. The way to build confidence that your software is well made, you do a proper external security audit and obtain the requisite certificate from a proper auditing firm.
It's also incorrect to think peer review in mathematics is low quality (like it is in some other fields). Certainly, when major results are in place, editors ensure that high quality peer reviewers are recruited and do their job properly. Like all human processes this fails sometimes, but not enough to not do it.
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So they could also dump a 100 quadrillion line proof in Bourbaki notation and call it a day?
The proof was released in the spirit of being first at all costs without any attempt to clean it up. I doubt that OpenAI mathematicians could give a coherent talk about it, certainly not using a blackboard.
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not submitting to whatever journal is quite different than saying they are "beyond peer review"
are people not reviewing openai claims right now?
People described the problems as solved the minute they were made public.
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You are confusing two levels of indirection here.
Peer review is a proxy for correctness.
Peer review journal is a proxy for quality peer review, or at least it was, once upon a time.
Because they want to release everything on github so everyone can peer review it themselves
This is far more efficient and they’re telling the academic industry to grow up
Sister comments are saying that academics dont like the Lean programming language and see a lack of human language described proof. Doesn’t sound like something I should care about but I’m watching for a better human language description of the problem as this discussion evolves
"not interested in" != "beyond"
I've seen a lot of breathless reporting about various mathematical things being "proven" on the basis of the LLM-generated Lean formulation compiling. We probably wouldn't declare that for a human-written proof until peers had checked the proof for errors
This. The proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem took 15+ months to check. It’s absurd to see the media reporting that these big problems are solved based off of a news release and a hastily and mostly AI-written manuscript, and OpenAI et al. are all too happy to run with said breathless reporting.
Wiles' proof was informal and couldn't be checked by a computer. In this case, the experts need to check 300 lines of Lean code (mostly comments) and confirm that it formalizes the problem statement correctly. There are papers building on the solution and analyzing it for more general versions of the problem, which suggests that the PDE community has already accepted it and moved on.
there's breathless reporting of just about everything scientific. physics, astronomy, archaeology, etc. have this sort of thing all the time.
yet i have never seen anyone say "the idea that physicists are beyond peer review is harmful" because some mainstream news articles published a piece about dark energy or whatever.
Exactly. Coverage here is "OpenAI has solved problem X", not "OpenAI has claimed to solve problem X."
Anyone who doesn't understand peer review (its intended workings, its negative effects by implementation flaws, etc.) automatically assumes expression is beyond academic peer review, so thats potentially a lot of people...