upvote
The material is interesting, but unless the statement that is proved in lean is not blowup for Navier-Stokes, then it's still proven.

What the examples seem to show is that the proof method is different between the natural language proof and the lean proof. Which, if the lean proof actually proves blowup, would suggest that the natural language proof is subtly wrong, but the strategy was close enough to be used to create a real lean proof.

A little worrying, but part of the purpose of formalizing things in Lean, it forces you to be more accurate than natural language does. It's surprisingly common for major theorems to have slight inaccuracies early on that can be repaired. Famously, the initial proof of Fermat's Last Theorem had a flaw that took a year to repair (though I think that's unusually difficult).

So the most fundamental question is: does the Lean theorem faithfully state the right theorem?

reply
That assumes the natural language paper came first and then was formalized in lean. I haven't looked too deeply into how these labs solve these problems (or if they even specify this publicly) but you could also start with lean and then write the natural language proof based on it.

For what it's worth the initial lean specifications for the top-level theorems generally come from human written formalizations such as in https://github.com/leanprover-community/mathlib4/blob/021ce6... so we can be reasonably confident about their correctness.

reply
Not quite — the formal statement of the problem in Lean may be correct, and therefore the Lean proof gives quite a lot of confidence that the statement is true. It's just that the proof given in natural language doesn't necessarily match up with the Lean proof, so the natural language proof might be unsound even though the statement it's proving is true.
reply
I was having trouble wrapping my head around it but this cleared it up.
reply
> If the lean proof doesn't match the natural language one (which is the one the AI generated to solve the problem), it sounds like the lean proof isn't verifying the intended claim?

No, the other way around. The natural language proof was derived from the lean code, badly. This is my experience with using claude and lean to prove things. Its natural language explanations drift a lot from the lean, both before and after. But the lean code is the lean code.

reply
> The natural language proof was derived from the lean code, badly.

Was it? Are you claiming a LLM does reasoning in lean or what? Since this (and all the other proofs by OpenAI etc) have been in the reverse order [1]:

> The agents arrived at their resolution on Saturday, September 5, about 88 hours after the first agents were launched. Lean formalization and verification took an additional 17 hours via GPT‑6 Astra.

[1]: https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

reply
Yeah, I was surprised some people think LLMs are reasoning in Lean directly... all their training data is in NL.
reply
An incredible number of people think that it is reasoning in lean. Argued with several people on this topic. I think they read headlines about lean being used by LLMs and assume it is being used to write the proof.
reply
It's not that much of a stretch: give the LLM a top-level proposition for the thing you want to prove and have it hack away at it. Each sub-step is verified in lean so you know it's correct. But, the linked post definitely suggests otherwise.

That is definitely interesting because how do you know the 88 hours of work are correct before you throw another 17 hours of lean formalization work on it? You could end up just finding out there was some hallucination in the original work.

reply
deleted
reply
That makes some sense. Given that the vast majority of math in its training data is going to be in NL/latex, I just assumed that the core reasoning happens in NL with occasional LEAN checks to ensure validity.
reply