Greece and Egypt are discussing extending their Exclusive Economic Zone eastwards towards Cyprus after eastern Libya’s parliament ratified a disputed maritime agreement with Turkey earlier this week, Greece’s foreign minister said. Greece, Egypt and Cyprus have long opposed the Turkey-Libya maritime accord, arguing that it infringes on their own maritime claims in the eastern Mediterranean. […]
Sam Altman says mathematicians are coming around after OpenAI upended mathematics.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and mathematicians have a complicated relationship.
OpenAI has taken credit for solving hundreds of math problems, irking many mathematicians.
At a recent talk at Stanford, Altman said mathematicians have already gone from anger to acceptance.
Like someone in mourning, Sam Altman said mathematicians went through phases after OpenAI began its blitz into the field.
First, there was disbelief. Then, there was pain.
"The day one reaction was like, 'We're cooked, and our field is over,'" OpenAI's CEO said. "'We're telling our grad students to switch majors.'"
After that, there was anger.
"The day three reaction was maybe like: 'It's horrible that OpenAI did this,'" Altman said at a recent talk at Stanford, before hundreds of students jittery about the viability of their future careers.
Come day five, though, in Altman's telling, mathematicians began to come around to what he described as AI's now-inalienable role in the study of numbers and proofs.
"We've now seen a lot of people say, actually, I'm going to have a different but hopefully better kind of career as a mathematician," Altman said.
Altman's buoyant assessment contrasts sharply with what some in the math community have described as an existential transformation.
After OpenAI abruptly broke into the field's prerogatives in September, announcing its models had solved the Navier-Stokes equations —a famously challenging math puzzle that stumped the industry's brightest since the 19th Century— preeminent mathematicians erupted in fury.
A pair of academics, one at New York University and another at Anthropic, accused OpenAI of using data from their chat logs to help crack the problem. Mathematicians also complained that while an AI model might have solved the problem, it didn't show its work, leaving them with the less celebratory task of verifying it.
And in the wake of all that controversy, there was more controversy.
A group of undergrads at Caltech, wary of how rapidly AI was disrupting their field and wanting to stay relevant, advertised a "mathathon" where participants were encouraged to use AI to solve long-standing problems.
OpenAI dropped out of sponsoring the event after more than 700 academics signed an open letter denouncing the competition for promoting AI "slop." (Organizers have since made adjustments to the rules, and the competition is set for November.)
More recently, Terence Tao, a math prodigy at UCLA who earned his doctorate at 20, said math's "romantic era" is over, as top academics like him adjust to a workflow that involves verifying AI's work rather than solving problems individually.
"Some things are being lost," Tao said after OpenAI this month said it solved over 700 more problems.
Meanwhile, Altman, sitting on the opposite side of the debate, has adopted the optimism of the disrupter.
"I don't think there's going to be like a job apocalypse," Altman said of AI causing companies to restructure their workforces. In the field of math, however, Altman said the disruptions came more quickly than in other disciplines and industries.
"That was the fastest that I think we've all gotten to watch a field go through this cycle," he said.
A museum has been accused of "woke madness at its most ridiculous" after removing its Egyptian mummy exhibition because it does not have "consent from the deceased individual".
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said Egypt’s military support for Saudi Arabia would be limited to defending the kingdom’s territory and borders and would not include an attack on Yemen, the presidency said on Wednesday, as the Iran-allied Houthis intensify attacks on the kingdom.
Sisi’s comments came as Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty and intelligence chief Hassan Rashad met Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh, Saudi state news agency SPA said. Abdelatty delivered a written message from Sisi to King Salman, and the two sides discussed bilateral ties and regional developments, SPA said.
The letter concerned strengthening bilateral ties and affirmed Egypt’s full solidarity with and support for Saudi Arabia, Egypt’s foreign ministry said in a statement.
Any Egyptian military backing for Saudi Arabia could mark a significant escalation in the broader Middle East conflict, which has threatened global energy supplies and pushed oil prices higher since the US and Israel attacked Iran in February.
Egypt would also defend the territory of any other Arab country if asked, Sisi said, but its military effort would not extend beyond Egyptian territory or that of an Arab state whose security and stability Cairo was seeking to protect.
On Monday, Egypt’s parliament delayed until October 26 a vote on authorizing the armed forces to support Saudi Arabia if requested, lawmakers said.
Fighting between the Saudi-led coalition backing Yemen’s internationally recognised government and the Houthis, who control the capital Sanaa and much of the north, has escalated in recent weeks, opening another front in the US-Israeli war on Iran.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia are close strategic and economic partners. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, including the United Arab Emirates, provided Egypt with billions of dollars in aid, central bank deposits and investments after the 2013 military overthrow of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi. Sisi became president a year later.
Egypt, a regional military power, previously joined the Saudi-led coalition that intervened in Yemen in 2015 in support of the government against the Houthis, though it played a limited combat role in the civil war.
A Dallas-area juvenile arrested by the FBI for planning a terrorist attack on behalf of ISIS may also have been planning to assassinate Rep. Keith Self (R-TX), the co-founder and co-chair of the Sharia-Free America Caucus, according to information reviewed by Breitbart News.
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