Anthony Leverrier

researcher on quantum error correction

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

Certainly the most surprising result in my career so far: a new qLDPC decoder that I thought had no chance to work!

We call it the Frontier decoder, joint work with Rüdiger Urbanke (1/4)

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

@billionsmustliv let's agree to disagree

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

"We have entire institutions that were supposed to be focused on innovation... that cannot adapt meaningfully to a world with AI."

sadly true

[Daniel Lemire @lemire]

AI is an apocalypse in the sense that it reveals all. Or it reveals much.

We have mathematicians arguing that solving the problems that they themselves identified as the goals (in their funding applications and talks) never mattered.

We have the finest literary people in France who were collectively fooled by a novel written by AI. None of them would ever accept AI authorship.

We have been told for decades that without copyright, there could be no progress... and all of a sudden, we have these machines producing copyright-free content, often breaking new ground.

We have entire institutions that were supposed to be focused on innovation... that cannot adapt meaningfully to a world with AI.

We are left wondering. What is actual progress and what is mere signalling. How people react to AI tells us much.

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

this is how it starts

[NSA Cyber @NSACyber]

Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

revenue grows 12x per year. @paulg would approve I think!

[B2H2 @basilh_2]

the anthropic singularity is slightly delayed [slop]

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

@MichalOszmaniec agreed, but this already targets the initial proposal of boson sampling where the hardness was established in the diluted regime.

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

Interesting development for quantum supremacy:
this paper gives a polynomial classical algorithm for the original boson sampling proposal of Aaronson-Arkhipov for any constant-fraction loss, ie any implementation without fault tolerance (1/2)

https://t.co/R69XStg5KX

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

wondering whether the whole field would have accelerated so fast if such a paper had appeared immediately after the initial AA proposal.

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

1) This is remarkable.
2) If mathematicians can find such simplified proofs (with the help of AI) so soon after the first proof was published, I don't see why future AI couldn't do that on its own in the near future.

[Jared Duker Lichtman @jdlichtman]

No Siegel zeros proved in 3 pages

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

huge congrats to @QuantinuumQC

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

Awesome work!
And they even use our Frontier decoder ;-)

[Craig Gidney @CraigGidney]

Congrats to quantinuum on seeing color code lifetime improve 12x going from d=3 to d=5 and ~12x again from d=5 to d=7: https://t.co/KMvWHjdI50

Notes:
- This suggests practical error rates reached at d≈21; need more qubits
- The 20ms cycle time is brutally slow; need more speed

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

I don’t know where we got the idea that humans were super smart.

[Haider. @haider1]

Mathematician Terence Tao:

"one thing this whole era of AI is teaching us is that our idea of intelligence is not really accurate"

The history of AI has been: 'here’s a task only humans can do', and then one by one, an algorithm does it too

Maybe we're not quite as smart as we think

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

Reading paper reviews these days and seeing a lot of "under the stated assumption". Are there any human reviewers who really write this?

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

@billionsmustliv it's a simple extrapolation of the current trend continuing

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

imagine in 6 months, when the next internal models at frontier labs will write these 5-page proofs from the book directly

[Przemek Chojecki | PC @prz_chojecki]

5 page proof of no Siegel zeroes by Ben Green 🤯

https://t.co/WkWH7FJIwT

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

It may surprise outsiders that many academic papers can be considered as curiosities. But this is a small price to pay to get true advances sometimes.

[Jared Duker Lichtman @jdlichtman]

It may surprise those outside number theory to learn that, for decades, people had written several papers that assumed a Siegel zero exists:

Famously, in 1982 Heath-Brown proved the twin prime conjecture in this hypothetical world.

Now in light of the Siegel zero disproof, a collection of the literature has now become something of a historical curiosity.

https://t.co/HSSpR3pSOs

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

@mahdi_tcs_ @Bayesprof Of course, it’s a span!
😁

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

@dajmeyer @RobertHuangHY I think the field is moving to more and more engineering questions, and that ‘s good! Time to build this thing!

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

Why not use the same energy to try to understand the OpenAI proofs instead?

[Antoine Tilloy @AntoineTilloy]

Ils s'attaquent désormais au bar en dessous de chez nous, en utilisant des vélos électriques comme béliers

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

At least no one is claiming that OpenAI stole their ideas on this one.

[Mehmet Mars Seven 🐴 @MehmetMars7]

TERENCE TAO:

“OpenAI did make a major breakthrough [on quasi-Riemann Hypothesis] the biggest advance on the subject in 50 years. A massive new zero-free region, very clever new technique.

Well, it’s sort of a combination of three or four existing ideas, arranged in a very unusual way. It’s not something I think any single mathematician alive would have come up with.

I think if you got the right people to work together and locked them in a room, they might have come up with this after lots of trial and error.”

[Anthony Leverrier @letonyo]

Nice to see some mathematicians excited by AI results!

[News from Science @NewsfromScience]

On 6 October, James Maynard was nervously checking his phone under the table throughout dinner. He’d heard rumors of a tsunami heading for the shores of math. When he checked in one last time from bed, the swell struck: OpenAI had released more than 700 math papers, generated with an advanced version of its AI model. They appeared to topple hundreds of long-standing problems, forcing researchers to face the reality that no problem in math is off-limits for machines.

At first, Maynard, a mathematician at the University of Oxford and recipient of the Fields Medal, math’s most prestigious prize, feared for colleagues whose work would be upended. But then he spotted a paper that offered progress on one of his favorite pastimes: the Riemann hypothesis, a puzzle about prime numbers and one of seven famed Millennium Prize Problems, often considered the most formidable in all of math. “I was like a kid at Christmas,” Maynard says. “Even if it was some scary monster giving me a gift, I was just so excited.”

The release comes less than 1 month after OpenAI announced a solution to the Navier-Stokes equations, another Millennium Prize Problem. OpenAI’s latest proof solves only a weaker version of the Riemann hypothesis. But Maynard, who made the most recent notable Riemann advance in 2024, says it is “groundbreaking” and likely to have payoffs for other problems across math. “Within analytic number theory, it’s obviously the best headline result for the past 100 years in the field.”

Learn more: https://t.co/zq4l1m4of5