Leading OpenAI researcher announced a GPT-5 math breakthrough that never happened
OpenAI researchers recently claimed a major math breakthrough on X, but quickly walked it back after criticism from the community, including Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis, who called out the sloppy communication.
Reproducibility is a bedrock of scientific progress. However, it’s remarkably difficult to get reproducible results out of large language models.
For example, you might observe that asking ChatGPT the same question multiple times provides different results. This by itself is not surprising, since getting a result from a language model involves “sampling”, a process that converts the language model’s output into a probability distribution and probabilistically selects a token.
What might be more surprising is that even when we adjust the temperature down to 0This means that the LLM always chooses the highest probability token, which is called greedy sampling. (thus making the sampling theoretically deterministic), LLM APIs are still not deterministic in practice (see past discussions here, here, or here). Even when running inference on your own hardware with an OSS inference library like vLLM or SGLang, sampling still isn’t deterministic (see here or here).
A very common question I see about LLMs concerns why they can't be made to deliver the same response to the same prompt by setting a fixed random number seed. …
Yann LeCun "Mathematical Obstacles on the Way to Human-Level AI"
Yann LeCun, Meta, gives the AMS Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture at the 2025 Joint Mathematics Meetings on “Mathematical Obstacles on the Way to Human-Level AI.” This talk was introduced by Bryna Kra, Northwestern University, President of the AMS.
Shortform link:
https://shortform.com/artem
In this video we will talk about backpropagation – an algorithm powering the entire field of machine learning and try to derive it from first principles.
OUTLINE:
00:00 Introduction
01:28 Historical background
02:50 Curve Fitting problem
06:26 Random vs guided adjustments
09:43 Derivatives
14:34 Gradient Descent
16:23 Higher dimensions
21:36 Chain Rule Intuition
27:01 Computational Graph and Autodiff
36:24 Summary
38:16 Shortform
39:20 Outro
USEFUL RESOURCES:
Andrej Karpathy's playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAqhIrjkxbuWI23v9cThsA9GvCAUhRvKZ&si=zBUZW5kufVPLVy9E
Jürgen Schmidhuber's blog on the history of backprop:
https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/who-invented-backpropagation.html
CREDITS:
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