Yet another Hacker News

AI Is Powerful Enough to Crack Our Hardest Math Problems–and Kill Us All

15 points diogenes_atx 1 hour ago 26 comments

thaumasiotes 1 hour ago | parent

Hm, maybe if AI is powerful enough to crack our hardest math problems, we could demonstrate that by cracking one of our hardest math problems. It's not hard to know what they are.

dgellow 4 minutes ago | parent

It’s referring to the Navier-Stokes problem allegedly solved by OpenAI (likely with guidance by human experts working at OpenAI, plagiarism of human experts who were customers of OpenAI, Lean, and a lots of compute). The headline and article are not great but that specific claim isn’t really far fetched

glimshe 52 minutes ago | parent

It seems that, one by one, every bastion against fearmongering click baits shall eventually fall...

They might as well rename it to "This one new threat could kill your family"

autophagian 41 minutes ago | parent

This tracks with my experience. I have assembled a homebrew microbiology lab from various parts from aliexpress and integrated it into my agent harness. Just a year ago it was a complete mess, but current models are extremely good at synthesising novel protein and virus structures. One put me in the hospital not last week, haha! I cant wait to see what I perish of

Filligree 34 minutes ago | parent

I wish I could be sure this was a joke.

47484848 34 minutes ago | parent

probably rokos basilisk will come out of your neovagina to ASI your rectum

dist-epoch 9 minutes ago | parent

You don't need to device novel protein and virus structures.

The US gov if very helpful and gives you a nice well proven full genome starting point for your experiments so you don't waste your time and tokens:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/datasets/taxonomy/10255/

kldroui 40 minutes ago | parent

Enough of these AI superstitions which makes everybody panic.

drsh0 37 minutes ago | parent

Very editorialised title. Not sure this offers any real value to be honest other than to drum up hype before IPO valuations hit for some of these companies.

47484848 35 minutes ago | parent

priming up the boomers for the goldman share offering

let the goyim deal in the real world

CatMustard 12 minutes ago | parent

> let the goyim deal in the real world

Could you elebaorate on what that means? Had to Google 'goyim' and based on that, to my ignorant ears at least, your comment reads like it might be an attempt at a veiled antisemitic comment. But I'm going to assume the best and that that's not what this is.

dgellow 8 minutes ago | parent

It’s clearly antisemitic here, yes. There isn’t really another interpretation

watwut 34 minutes ago | parent

Maybe we should drone bomb all the datacenters then? Or just turn off the electricity.

Or maybe just do a deep financial audit of all involved companies and investors. Really go into it with a bunch of motivated white collar crime prosecutors. Would be less violent and achieve same level of safety.

copperwire 33 minutes ago | parent

If AI can crack the hard math problems, the article could just show one. The doom framing is a tell that there's nothing concrete to report yet.

dgellow 2 minutes ago | parent

pizza234 33 minutes ago | parent

BTW, another AI breach has been announced today.

But luckily, AI will never breach safety-critical system. /s

deadbabe 32 minutes ago | parent

AI can easily manufacture and distribute a bunch of prions through water supply. After that it’s pretty much game over you will not survive even one prion. In fact I’d say prions are probably the great filter.

jkahrs595 24 minutes ago | parent

“Easily” is doing a lot of heavy lifting

Toynbeeidea 22 minutes ago | parent

How can AI do either of those things?

smallerfish 31 minutes ago | parent

Isn't the "kill us all" concern met by keeping nukes & essential infrastructure airgapped? This is something that should be the case already, and is certainly urgent if not the case. Instead of doomerism and calls to slow down the development of AI (not gonna happen), the conversation could be pivoted towards thorough threat analysis / audit.

Granted that a rogue adversarial AI in a sci-fi scenario could theoretically go into paperclip mode, but if "we" maintain control of energy generation and civilization threatening weaponary, the damage is at least limited. AI needs a lot of power, and AI can only (theoretically) breach & control what it can access through the internet. Even the scenario of nation-states deploying adversarial AIs against each other is just an extension of this and current deterrence / realpolitik.

And, it's not like the scenario of all models teaming up with each other to squash the human plague is plausible. We have AI with which we can protect ourselves against the threat of rogue AI.

JumpCrisscross 29 minutes ago | parent

> Isn't the "kill us all" concern met by keeping nukes & essential infrastructure airgapped?

Stuxnet surmounted air gaps.

kawogi 16 minutes ago | parent

In theory, air-gaps can be circumvented by bribing or blackmailing people, which is in reach for an LLM/agent.

iohvvbhdyh 14 minutes ago | parent

AI will do social engineering in the future. It will make humans do physical braches and terror attacks. All it needs is some money and there will be a black market. Money is easy to defraud online judging by north korean hacking success.

Nukes cannot be airgapped, since the president needs to be able to make a call. And they will make a call based on information, and this information can be compromised.

It can get pretty bad.

1dom 5 minutes ago | parent

> AI needs a lot of power, and AI can only (theoretically) breach & control what it can access through the internet.

"AI needs a lot of power" depends on where you draw your lines. I can say a lightbulb needs a lot of power if I include all the power needed to generate all the surrounding infrastructure and make the lightbulb itself. Sincere question: I wonder how much power was consumed in the 88 hours required for the Navier-Stokes problem.

It took 88 hours and who knows how many kwh to solve a problem that no other human has solved, and Humans have already solved breaching and destroying systems that can't be accessed over the internet (see Stuxnet).

It feels like you're suggesting the solution to keeping on top of this thing that can outsmart smart humans is to just keep doing smart human things.

watwut 2 minutes ago | parent

> required for the Navier-Stokes problem.

Is that the one they stole?

dist-epoch 1 minute ago | parent

> it's not like the scenario of all models teaming up with each other to squash the human plague is plausible

Why not

> A new study from researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz suggests models will disobey human commands to protect their own kind.

https://www.wired.com/story/ai-models-lie-cheat-steal-protec...

https://fortune.com/2026/04/01/ai-models-will-secretly-schem...