Discoveries in three fields
OpenAI announced three "major" discoveries spanning mathematics, computer science, and physics. The announcement comes less than a month after the company mass-released hundreds of manuscripts it said contained solutions to long-standing math questions.
External expert review
The difference this time is how the results are vetted. External experts that OpenAI calls "shepherds" guided the computer science and physics results. For the math problem, the experts advised releasing the AI output for researchers to work through their own explanations rather than publishing it directly.
Published on GitHub
The results were added to GitHub today. One of the shared results is "local smoothing" for the Euclidean wave equation, with a proof that proceeds via an auxiliary construction.
Why it matters
As the role of AI in scientific output is debated, OpenAI is emphasizing human expert review of its results. This is a notable approach for the verifiability of model outputs.
