Hacker News surfaces critique framing OpenAI result as 'malicious exploit'
5 Oct 12 10:46 PM · 2d ago · 1 article · 1 post · 2 sources · development 5 of 5
The Argmin critique gains traction on Hacker News with a headline characterizing the OpenAI algorithm as less a breakthrough and more a malicious exploit, drawing 43 points and 15 comments.
“OpenAI algorithm for the FFT is less a breakthrough and more a malicious exploit”
mochomocha, Hacker News commenter · hn ↗OpenAI Research organizationArgmin author Mathematics researcher and technical criticRyan Shea Independent researcherJohn D. Cook Mathematics blogger
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first by HN Frontpage, 2d ago
What people said 22 voices · verbatim
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The author is attacking the field of theoretical algorithm design broadly as being useless. If we take the author's logic to its conclusion, many algorithms we learn about in a standard Algorithm Design course such as "median of medians" (finding the median in a list in O(n) worst-case time) is useless because it is not used in practice. Even the…
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A very readable (as long as you can stomach multiplication, the log function, and powers) discussion of the OpenAI dump of pseudo-proofs*. Calling them pseudo bc they fail to carry out the second function of proofs: to make the result comprehensible and worth examining to *some* mathematician. https://www. argmin.net/p/faster-fourier-tr…
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> The theory of computer science has become a form of mathematics that doesn’t concern itself with computersPerfectly summarizes the post, which I'd qualify as a rant (the author's main gripe seems to be that it's a galactic algorithm that assumes exact complex multiplication). The theory of computer science literally started with a mathematical…
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A look at OpenAI’s math that’s claimed computes faster Fourier transforms Link: https://www. argmin.net/p/faster-fourier-tr ansforms Discussion: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5 0065932
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This is a bad take. I will happily acknowledge the new term "slopository" which I had not heard before, while taking the author to task for malice towards theorists. STOC/FOCS/SODA, etc are not about "doing practical algorithms". If you want that, you go to ESA, ALENEX, or VLDB/SIGMOD, or any of the other more applied venues featuring this work. I…
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If you read the entire argument, it makes perfect sense. It’s simultaneously mocking the poorly established ways of measuring asymptotic complexity of algorithms.TL;DR - time complexity calculations ignore constant values. So if algorithm A takes 10^10 + n number of iterations to do something, and B does n^2, in theory B is worse, because n < n^2…
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great article, and when i read that:"I found the rot that develops inside applied mathematical theory when formalism becomes so detached from reality that a “breakthrough” is nothing more than an artifact of mathematicians not being able to properly specify the rules of their games in natural language."it's like in my company, where some software…
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Did not realize that the model of computation for all of the banner computational complexity results from last week was "exact complex arithmetic." Is this and/or "exact real arithmetic" a common premise for papers in this field? My assumption as an outsider was that people mostly care about things equivalent to Turing machines.edit: by "things…
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This made me chortle:> Did I read this paper? Of course not. No one at OpenAI read this paper either, so why should I? I did what every other mathematician in the world does with AI slop mathematics: I fed it back into the slop machine and ran an information retrieval session with a chatbot interface to extract salient facts. Anthropomorphically…
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If algorithmic theorists don't care about practical performance then why should we care about what they're doing? It's just a strange game they're playing, of no interest to anyone else.It seems like rather than coming up with more "galactic" algorithms, a more useful thing to do might be to come up with a replacement for big-O that's not so…
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I'm confused by some of the reactions here. Isn't this the first step toward taking theory into reality? So, FT could be faster if we could multiply larger numbers. The problem has now moved from is it possible to "do we have the hardware to do it?" Not my area, so maybe someone could explain to me why this isn't a question of how large the…
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So, the pseudo-FFT exploits algorithmic similarity between DFT and multiplication to translate part of the DFT work into multiplication work, which is O(1) in the exact arithmetic model.Thus, the magnitudes of the numbers being multiplied grow superpolynomially with n (the DFT problem size): because the robot's stuffing its work in there and using…
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As a theorist, it's sort of true that I "don't care" about galactic constants. I'm interested in the structure of computation for philosophical reasons. But I really do care about the model of computation.To put it another way, the constants inside a big-O are not really constant: they depend on what you assume is a constant-time operation.
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> the algorithm requires you to multiply complex numbers whose magnitudes grow superpolynomially with n.Err... doesn't that completely invalidate the big-O analysis!?I suspected that these Open AI "proofs" of sub-nlogn times were cheating somehow, by sweeping something under a rug. This seems to be it!
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"Malicious" is an overstatement, but "exploit" is completely fair in my view. Theory with no possible practical relevance is useless, and I think a computational complexity result requiring arbitrary-precision arithmetic that is impossible to implement using any physical system qualifies.
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The author could have left AI entirely out of the essay and come to the same conclusions. He just really doesn't like TCS. That's fine, it's really a part of mathematics not science, but it's silly to dismiss a field with "theoretical" in its name for being impractical.
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I’ve made some half hearted attempts to try and understand even the framing of some of these problems that were solved, and my god theoretical math is hard. It’s completely impenetrable with unknown symbols and hard to comprehend bounds and several orders of derivatives. It’s all unintuitive to me.
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There is currently an effort underway to improve the bound. They have reached at a much larger kappa around 0.001635527380375392
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> If you want that, you go to ESA, ALENEX, or VLDB/SIGMOD, or any of the other more applied venues featuring this workWell, I want openAI to focus on these things instead, so it is not a totally unreasonable thing to advocate against their current focus
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> I can have this view while simultaneously thinking that Ben is a badassYeah? Seems more like an ass.
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>malice >shit on I don't think this is a productive or interesting way to discuss mathematics.
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This is a theoretical computer science paper. This is what they are like! Post sucks.
All 5 developments of Math researcher debunks OpenAI's faster Fourier transform… →
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