Gary Marcus 给 OpenAI 的数学成绩单泼冷水：Astra 能解数学题是因为数学能自动验证，换到现实问题就不好说。别急着吹成万能。
Gary Marcus 发文指出，OpenAI 的 Astra 在数学上的成功并不代表通用能力。数学依赖符号验证和合成数据，容易刷分，但现实世界无法模拟。Astra 只擅长某些数学题，并非全领域领先，其证明写作能力也不及题目求解。他质疑 Astra 能解决 PDF 数字提取等现有模型难题。Marcus 强调，Astra 不是奇点，也不意味着自动化科学发现时代到来。
Top eight misconceptions about OpenAI’s amazing new Astra math results. 1. Expertise in one domain...
Top eight misconceptions about OpenAI’s amazing new Astra math results. 1. Expertise in one domain does not at all guarantee expertise in all or even most domains. There is an important, principled reason to think that success on math is a special case which will not generalize as much people might hope. Math lends itself to two things: verification (using symbolic tools), and massive amounts of cheaply produced synthetic data where you can guarantee that the answers are correct. The same applies to coding — but it is not true in general. You can generate as many math facts as you want; you can’t simulate the open-ended world. You can verify math; you can’t verify a military strategy in the same way. OpenAI can do what Astra does in math because math allows for external tools to do verification and to create synthetic data. That doesn’t make Astra less impressive, but as we learned a decade ago from IBM’s shambolic and ultimately failed attempt to turn Jeopardy-winning Watson into a cancer-fighting machine, success in one domain does not guarantee success in all. 2. Yesterday's tweet and blog were marketing, not science. Neither of those nor the 249-page math article that went with them give any information about how this was accomplished. 3. Astra is good at some math but it is very doubtful that math is “solved” (as a lot of people on X seemed to believe). It seems to be good at certain kinds of math but quite possibly not all. In the newsletter version of this I give lots of examples where it might actually faill 4. Consistent with my general prediction that facility in math doesn’t guarantee universality, it appears that Astra’s proofwriting is not on par with the proofs themselves 5. I seriously doubt that Astra will magically solve all the things that don’t work reliably in current models. Will it be able to reliably extract numbers from arbitrary PDFs? Doubt it. Will it solve Sabine Hossenfelder’s desire to have AI write scripts for her YouTube series? Doubt it. 6. Astra is not (as Musk suggested) the Singularity. Enough said. (But see my recent essay on the topic; nothing has really changed). 7. It is absurd to claim that the Astra debut is “plausibly the most significant day in the history of mathematics” as a bunch of people went around saying, based on a quote from one run of Fable (which might give different answers if asked twice). There was no new theory, no new techniques, and as impressive as it is, it is not on remotely on par with the development of calculus, algebra, logarithms, probability, the decimal system, information theory, the concept of zero I doubt it will lead directly to a cure for cancer, or enormous advances in “materials research, energy production, drug discovery, Everything”, as some excitable AI “influencers” envision. 8. Nor does this mean we just entered “the era of automated scientific discovery”, as multiple recent papers have shown. More detailed essay with links at garymarcus.substack.com (over 110k subscribers). 💬 8 🔄 7 ❤️ 25 👀 4409 📊 11 ⚡