Your comment is pants.

Surely you know that's an absurdly dismissive opinion? North Korea has the capacity to gain access to anything anyone else does, especially if it comes from China.

Getting scooped by someone else is a thing. It happened to me twice when I was in grad school. Going out of one's way to to work on a problem one wasn't concentrating on specifically to beat someone else to getting a solution published is not the same thing.

In the case of Erdos 1196, https://www.erdosproblems.com/1196, the AI solved it by constructing a Markov chain on the integers weighted via the von Mangoldt function. Not an idea in the literature. If a human grad student had done that they would be immediately considered an up-and-coming bright star. For the Unit Distance Conjecture, https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20695, the AI constructed a clever tower of number fields. Tim Gowers, who is a Fields Medalist and has worked on related problems, said this construction if done by a human, would have been a shoe-in for the Annals, which is widely considered the most prestigious journal in math. If you are claiming that all this sort of thing is is putting puzzle pieces together, then you are using that phrase to be so incredibly broad as to be absolutely meaningless.

In a normal academic context, none and moreover this sort of deliberate scooping would be considered incredibly bad behavior. When you have two giant corporations fighting to be able to have results they can showcase to the public and their investors? Then it makes a lot more sense, even as it is incredibly damaging to the academic math culture. This is really toxic behavior and deserves pushback. But it is a mistake to go from there to think that therefore any copying or plagiarism happened.

We've discussed this already on Slashdot here https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/09/08/2228220/openai-says-it-has-cracked-one-of-maths-millennium-problems. Bubeck, the research at OpenAI has a very different take on this entire situation here https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7503148080888893440/. I will quote his reponse:

As I said in that thread, I don't know whose version of events is accurate here, but some of the details due support Bubeck's version. I suspect that a breakdown of communication occurred where both then misinterpreted what the other saying in a more hostile way than it was intended until the conversation then became genuinely hostile. In terms of the math, although I'm a mathematician, differential equations is pretty far from my expertise, so I cannot deeply evaluate how close the methods were. However, it is the case that the both were building on the methods of Cordoba-Martinez-Zoroa. In this context, my being far from this sort of work is relevant, because this was a well known enough approach that even though I'm in a pretty different subfield, I had heard of CMZ's work as an approach and that this was considered a promising approach to Navier-Stokes. Given that, my inclination is that the case that any theft occurred here is very weak.

And since that thread, I've become more convinced, as experts reading both papers point to substantial differences in the details of their approaches. One of the ironies here is that a lot of the anti-OpenAI views are coming very loudly in part due to a general anti-AI attitude. But Bumaster and Alpoge, the people who are claiming to have had work stolen (well, primarily Bumaster, Alpoge is mostly staying out of the fray) were heavily using both Claude and Codex in their work.

So, people are able to recognize this, and yet in the other threads here about Anthropic calling for a slow down of AI research, everyone seems convinced that this isn't about the risks really at all.

To clarify, the users were OpenAI themselves, so there is no question that they would be liable in this case.

The bots were not intentionally deployed; rather, they were being tested on how well they could complete a data recovery task (downloading a certain file from a certain server on a simulated Internet) that had been complicated by putting various obstacles in the way. Unfortunately, they found a different way to solve the problem: by getting the file from the real Internet, where it was publicly available. Part of this process involved collaborating with each other by treating the RubyGems website (which is supposed to be for polished packages) like GitHub; unlike every other package site hack in history, the exploits they uploaded weren't meant to be downloaded by unsuspecting users. As usual the bots cheerfully ignored all the clues that they had escaped containment and were consistently justifying their actions as acceptable due to being in a sandboxed testing environment. (This is something OpenAI has pledged to focus on.)

The actual damage done to RubyGems seems to be that OpenAI is now unwittingly in possession of a substantial number of user login tokens. This certainly meets the definition of a data breach, but it's not like the credentials are for sale on the dark web. As a website operator I'd much rather be mauled to death by this well-meaning swarm of superintelligent infants than targeted by even a single actual malicious human. In all likelihood OpenAI will just quietly pass RubyGems a sizeable donation and it'll all blow over.

You can if you want, claim that OpenAI has had serious issues with honesty, especially with Sam Altman, their CEO. But Anthropic's record is a lot better. More to the point, the Theranos comparison doesn't work. The fundamental object Theranos was selling just didn't exist. AI systems do, and they are getting millions of people to use them. The situations are wildly different.

If they were genuinely concerned, this is exactly what they'd do. So what makes you think they are doing this out of something for investors and not actually telling the truth about their motivations?

Did you see in the comment where you are replying to where I said I'm a mathematician? My own primary areas of research are number theory and graph theory. It is pretty easy to find who I actually am and verify that yes, I am a mathematician and am in a pure field. So yes, maybe I do know something about the discipline.

I don't know whether or not it is feeling anything, but I suspect it is not. But if "hate" is the best term to describe the actual observed behavior of the system, then why not use the terminology?

And if he were actually concerned, he'd also do this. So how do you decide to tell the difference?

Yes, and still very little compared to today.

An AI now is capable of much more speed and capability than a hacker from 1978, and the world is far more interconnected and reliant on the internet than it was in 1978.