Impactful scientific work requires working on the right problems—problems which are not just interesting, but whose solutions matter.
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Simon Willison discusses how the current trend of mining open mathematical problems in a non-renewable way could make these problems scarce. He notes that rumors of a problem can trigger large AI-driven efforts to solve it before original researchers can fully develop their work. This shift may discourage sharing promising research, potentially reversing centuries of open science and harming the field’s future.
Initial research projects advance national priorities across natural resources, manufacturing, nuclear physics, and more.
Scientific papers contain fine-grained records of problem solving: authors mention technical obstacles and methods that were used to address them, often along with reasoning on why those methods were chosen. We introduce MUSE (Mining Underlying Scientific Explanations), a full-text, multi-domain resource of scientific Problem-Solution-Rationale (P-S-R) triplets.
The paper introduces the Scientific Contribution Graph, a large-scale resource that extracts 6 million scientific contributions from 655 k open-access papers across multiple disciplines and links them with 36 million prerequisite edges. It frames automated technological roadmapping as the task of identifying contributions and their prerequisites, and presents a new scientific prerequisite prediction task where models forecast which existing technologies enable future discoveries. The authors report that current models achieve a 0.48 MAP score on temporally-filtered backtesting, indicating rapid progress in this area.
We’re releasing a new batch of seven unsolved problems which have come up in the course of our research at OpenAI.