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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14385 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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Ya, I think it was strategic to start this whole math run with that simple, easily-verifiable counterexample, because what we've received since then is not of that character. What we're getting now is mountains of slop that nobody has any hope of parsing in a thousand years, and that people can't even check in Lean because the "proofs" are so big they can't even be checked on consumer hardware.

But hey, if you pay into the totally-not-Ponzi-racket and buy industrial hardware at astronomically-inflated prices, you too can have the privilege to actually load the proofs in Lean!

and that people can't even check in Lean because the "proofs" are so big they can't even be checked on consumer hardware.

Did this retracted paper have a Lean formalization (IIUC not every paper in the repo does)? How much would it cost to run Lean on AWS to verify one of these proofs?

the "proofs" are so big they can't even be checked on consumer hardware

Fermat's Last Theorem verification squeezes into 256GB, which definitely isn't "consumer hardware", but it is on the workstation my job bought me 5 years ago; this is "prosumer" tier not "industrial". It's possible that OpenAI has come up with even trickier-to-verify formalizations, but I doubt it. Anthropic's FLT proof is 13.5M lines of Lean. All the recent OpenAI formalizations put together add up to 26M lines, but that's for 400 proofs. There's a lot of "library code" shared between proofs, so it's not as straightforward as 26M/400, but you're probably still going to be able to check at least some of them. This blogger/streamer tossed 3 of them at a tiny 7GB RAM cap and found that two hit the cap but one of the 3 topped out under 3GB.

How much would it cost to run Lean on AWS to verify one of these proofs?

For FLT it looks like you'd need a 16xlarge instance for 30-ish hours, so a bit over $100?

This particular one, no.

The concern isn't that Lean won't confirm the proofs. It's unlikely major AI vendors would brazenly lie like that. Rather, it's that you need to be able to use Lean like an IDE to poke around at the proof to investigate whether it even makes sense, whether they proved the thing they claimed to (a bug in the problem statement), or whether they found another bug in Lean itself.

As for running on some cloud host, my napkin math + Googling shows on the order of $1000/mo. But the thing is it's not just the cost: nobody that uses Lean knows anything about cloud hosting or how to set Lean up that way, because that's not the way anyone ever uses Lean. It would be like asking asking a Pokemon streamer to play with their GameBoy emulator on AWS instead of on their local PC. It's possible, yes, but the skillset to do so is completely orthogonal to what they usually do and they'd be lost attempting it. It's hard enough to even get mathematicans to use Lean in the first place, much less learn the basics of Linux sysadmin work.

As for running on some cloud host, my napkin math + Googling shows on the order of $1000/mo.

So $1.40 an hour? Doesn't seem that bad.

But the thing is it's not just the cost: nobody that uses Lean knows anything about cloud hosting or how to set Lean up that way, because that's not the way anyone ever uses Lean.

It's 2026, grandpa. There's no more excuses for not knowing how to open a PDF. You can just ask an LLM.

"Just pay into the racket bro"

Yes, we get it. Everyone has to throw all their money at the golem to be allowed to participate in society. Some of us aren’t buying it, in both senses.

You can use a free model. Or pay a few dollars (is that really all your money?) and use a better model.

I don't understand your perspective. Either LLMs are useless, in which case, what are we even talking about in this thread, or they aren't, in which case putting your head in the sand is not an effective long term strategy. "LLMs are eating my field and they're a racket" does not seem like a coherent position.

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