OpenAI's claimed disproof of Connes' Rigidity Conjecture is invalid [pdf]

32 pointsposted 12 hours ago
by muglug
(philarchive.org)

56 Comments

JellyYelly

11 hours ago

The author of this paper has also apparently published a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis. yeah idk if they should be trusted as an authority on this.

cocorebop

an hour ago

From what I can tell it seems like they are probably wrong, but a mathematician publishing a paper about a well known unsolved problem in mathematics does not indicate they are a crank, even if their paper is wrong. This is a thing respected researchers in mathematics do.

mikeyouse

11 hours ago

Crank author at a crank “institution” - I can’t assess whether the OpenAI paper is accurate but I highly doubt this is going to be the paper to disprove it.

startigerjen

5 hours ago

University of Kansas is not a crank institution. Author has MS and MA from KU and BSc summa cum laude / Valedictorian of her departments from UMKC. Trying to call her a crank for hosting a private think tank is jealous nonsense.

markasoftware

11 hours ago

Author is a crackpot. She does not meaningfully engage with anyone who points out the key flaw in her counterargument. See the thread here https://x.com/AcerFur/status/2083649346294382803

startigerjen

6 hours ago

Author is a PhD candidate who graduated summa cum laude in BSc Physics Valedictorian of her college and math with double master's degrees. You're the crackpot clearly, you provide no correct disproof of Nielsen.

muglug

6 hours ago

Thanks — sorry for spreading nonsense.

startigerjen

6 hours ago

The nonsense is the crackpot who wrote this evaluation. Nielsen is an established physicist close to completing two PhDs.

user

5 hours ago

[deleted]

startigerjen

6 hours ago

This is complete nonsense accusation. She disproved Acerfur completely.

OsrsNeedsf2P

11 hours ago

Genuine question - this is so hard for me to follow. Not that I could follow the original disproof anyways. But how is "truth" determined when the effort required to validate is so high?

gpt5

11 hours ago

It's a common problem in math. The famous proof for Fermat's last theorem took 2 years to validate.

auggierose

11 hours ago

That's different though. Understanding the spec of Fermat's last theorem is simple. Here, you already need to know some mathematics just to understand the spec.

kikokikokiko

11 hours ago

These AI generated proofs have something akin to the quantum algorithms that can generate a response that would take 1 billion years of processing to finish on a classical computer. How do you test them to see if the result was correct?

startigerjen

5 hours ago

No they don't. They have a few thousand lines and the hinge points are easy to find. This is more nonsense.

tacomonstrous

11 hours ago

Maybe there's an error, but much of this write-up reads like nonsense to me. The assertion that a semidirect product with an abelian factor must admit that factor in its center is absolutely false. This is actually acknowledged later in this article, but is handwaved away in incomprehensible fashion.

startigerjen

5 hours ago

Nielsen is an expert, not a crank. She worked at I2S at the University of Kansas and passed her master's and her PhD thesis in PhilSci / PhiLMath is on the web and completely airtight.

Tiberium

11 hours ago

This "paper" itself is 100% AI-generated...

ofjcihen

11 hours ago

What makes you say that? Not dunking, I skimmed it (I’m in no way at this level) and didn’t see anything outright Claud-y.

Tiberium

11 hours ago

This immediately struck me as Claud-y:

> The gap has two independent consequences, each sufficient to invalidate the claimed disproof. The first is structural.

Then the classic coding agents negation of earlier evidence, instaed of just updating to use new references, they mention that they changed old to new:

> The publicly released monolithic file ConnesRigidity.lean (37,000+ lines) does not use the names CocycleExtension, ZeroCocycle, or TwistedCocycle that appeared in the earlier modular source files (CocycleExtension.lean, ICC.lean, CrossedClosure.lean). However, the identical mathematical construction is present under different names. The following table gives the correspondence, with line numbers in the published file.

> This is the same zero-cocycle / twisted-cocycle structure identified in the earlier modular source files, confirming that the structural analysis of this note applies to the published code

And some other Claud-y stuff:

> Why both paths are closed. A successful defence would have to close both paths simultaneously

> This case illustrates a failure mode that is becoming increasingly well documented in the literature on AI-assisted formal mathematics: the gap between what a formal proof verifies and what it means. The Lean kernel certifies that a proof term inhabits a given type; it does not certify that the type faithfully encodes the intended mathematical claim. As Tao has emphasised

And afterwards I cross-verified with Pangram 4 which I trust, it marked the preamble/starting stuff as 100% AI-generated.

startigerjen

6 hours ago

You're using the wrong names from an older version of their paper and Nielsen's , she's updated to include the new relabels. The proof holds.

startigerjen

6 hours ago

That's false. It's not AI generated. It's AI checked. Nielsen has a style that often flags as AI because she uses many EM dashes and has a very rigorous style. Her papers from 2015-2020 also flag as AI generated, before AI was available.

Tiberium

4 hours ago

Can you provide a single example of such paper that would show as AI generated on Pangram?

startigerjen

6 hours ago

This attack on Nielsen's paper is crackpottery / academic revenge porn by John Synons. To base an attack on Nielsen on frickin Acerfur is using an undergrad who hasn't passed his first semester yet to take on a PhD student who graduated in physics and math summa cum laude. Nonsense.

muglug

5 hours ago

A lot of people who know mathematics say Nielsen’s paper is riddled with errors. I regret sharing it here.

> Undergrad who hasn’t passed his first semester yet

Not sure what you’re talking about. According to his wiki bio he’s done two years at Cambridge. He posted Maths questions from the 1B tripos exam, and was smart enough to get an OpenAI internship.

Whereas it seems like the author of this paper has never been hired anywhere by any company or institution — the "Center for Topological Physics" listed seems to exist only as a website.

Tiberium

10 hours ago

One of mathematicians working at OpenAI refuted those claims directly on X - https://x.com/AcerFur/status/2083656978719719601

jsnell

8 hours ago

Good grief that thread is sad, with it ending by Gary Marcus asking for the crank to be taken seriously.

startigerjen

5 hours ago

Yes that guy is an undergrad with ZERO math background. HAsn't even finished his first semester. He's very proud of being a wage slave with zero experience. He can't take on someone with a BSc Valedictorian of a large urban university with two master's degreees damn near to two PHDs. That's very unfair to him.

blahblaher

5 hours ago

So this is the level of science discourse now? AI really broke people's minds. If it's true or not, it will be eventually proved or not. Name calling really is the best you all can do?

toinewx

11 hours ago

does this show Lean is not bulletproof?

startigerjen

5 hours ago

Lean never was bullet proof. Nielsen also provides detailed lean, with correct labels. If you mislabel your labels you can prove the moon is made of cheese in Lean.

user

11 hours ago

[deleted]

startigerjen

6 hours ago

Complete bullshit. You don't know nontrivial from trivial groups LMFAO

user

10 hours ago

[deleted]

user

11 hours ago

[deleted]