15-25 kWh drawn by the utility is quite a bit! I hope they're paying him well for that.

They're bringing outside scrutiny into their processes; that's going to slow them down, too.

Not "at the same time". You're conflating what AI can do now with what it will likely be able to do in a year or five, or 20.

Amodei and others are worried about what AI that doesn't yet exist may do, not about what current-generation AI can do. AI is getting better, very quickly, and unless there's some blocking obstacle that no one has been able to identify will at some point become far, far smarter than humans, individually or collectively. So before that happens, we need to figure out how to make sure that superintelligent AI wants to help us, and wants to do it in the right way.

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.

Is this actually a substantial amount of energy? I'm in Utah (Rocky Mountain Power) and RMP also pays me to use my batteries... but the amount of energy they draw is tiny. 8-10 times per week they draw on my batteries, but it's like 4 kW peak draw (my batteries can sustain 20 kW), and generally for less than 30 seconds, so in any given week I'm only contributing like 0.2 kWh. As I understand it, this is because RMP uses my batteries not really to "serve loads", per se, but just as grid stabilization; brief backfill to keep the voltage from sagging.

Obviously my batteries do serve *my* loads, which reduces the load on the grid, but that's not what RMP pays me for.

Does CA make heavier use of residential batteries to feed the grid?

And JD Vance called him Hitler. Trump accepts changes of heart as long as they include sufficient groveling and self-humiliation. SBF's problem is he doesn't currently have any money, and doesn't have a lot of friends to put up cash for him either. If SCOTUS will overturn his fine on a technicality and he can get some or all of that money back, then he'll have the cash to buy a pardon. Obviously he needs to get it done in the next 2 years, four months.

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.

That's a pretty shallow(thought admittedly depressingly popular) analysis of the situation.

Being in public does leave you with no particular defensible expectations of not being observed, and possibly even remembered for a time, by assorted passers by; and typically also permits more direct tailing of people for observation purposes(subject to some, often slightly vague, threshold at which having PIs or paparazzi hunting someone remains a problem even in public; as we saw here where the police took the notion seriously enough to show up but not to do anything in particular).

What it has historically never meant, for technical reasons, was pervasive coverage and longterm retention. Which is certainly increasingly feasible with only moderate levels of investment; but is absolutely a novel development for what 'public' and 'no expectation of privacy' meant.

It's like defending the installation of a massive network of sprinklers because "you have no expectation of staying dry when you go outside; haven't you heard of rain?" Sure, nobody the weather to be sunny all the time, any more than they expect everyone to avert their eyes in public; but they would correctly consider the installation of irrigation equipment on every lamppost to be an intrusion on their ability to stay dry despite the fact that the sky has never extended them a constitutionally protected right to no rain.

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.

The fact that you're unwilling to pay the incredibly low price of attaching even a pseudonym to your statement speaks volumes. Not even by mentioning it in your AC post.