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.

Correct. The proper response is "I don't answer questions". And if they detain you, "I don't answer questions without a lawyer present".

The proper question is why should you be required to answer such a question if it's not related to a traffic stop. Your response is riddled with assumptions that first, the officer is investigating another crime, in which case indeed they may have questions to ask. A robbery? Do they have a description of the vehicle? Does it match yours, even minimally? If not, they really don't have any evidence on which to base a further expansion of the stop. Nonetheless, if you go to trial, you're not going to be required to say yes, that was my car. Let them prove it was your car. And in this case at the stop, all of what you're describing is more or less entirely inadequate for detention. Innocent until proven guilty is part of this. If they have reasonable suspicion, of course they can expand on the stop. If they're just fishing around, where you're coming from, where you're going, no.

Consider:

Traffic stop. Officer is making 'small talk'. "Where ya goin?". Where ya comin from?".

These are generally not 'small talk'. They are fishing questions, cop asking for info that could lead to suspicion, and detention while they dig for more.

And these sorts of questions can generally be answered by, simply, "None of your business, officer".

Every subsequent question, such as "I'm just making small talk", or "Hey, no big deal", or "What's the problem, you have something to hide?" are all just follow up fishing questions. And deserve no answer.

During a traffic stop, Flock gives officers information they would normally be lawfully denied, like "Where ya coming from?". Flock sidesteps your right to constitutionally refuse such information (and in the absence of reasonably articulable suspicion or other evidence, during a traffic stop, denies the officer the right to demand such information) and as such is a blight on constitutional protections. Flock must be better controlled, or abandoned.

And officers using Flock to look up the plates of their ex, former landlord, or the random guy who gave them a dirty look at a stop light are plainly violating these individuals' rights, and must be sanctioned. And the supervision of the abuses systems similarly sanctioned. Meaningful sanctions, every incident.

The Government rarely surrenders access to information. They seek power at every opportunity. In America, only the Constitution, and adherence to law, can nominally restrict this.

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.

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.

Computer AI will never care to listen to music voluntarily.

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.