Comment Re:Read Bubeck's response, not just Bumaster versi (Score 5, Interesting) 78
I'm not part of the anti-AI brigade, but I do see some serious problems here with the timing.
In the scientific world, you'd have to say that it would be very rare for major discoveries to be uncovered within weeks, like what just happened with Euler and Navier-Stokes. The overwhelming reason for this fast pace, is the ongoing AI company one upmanship. The goal is to pander to the market, and has nothing to do with scientific discovery. If OpenAI was interested in scientific discovery, why wouldn't they invite the best mathematicians into the room before they spend millions of dollars of AI inference to try and solve this problem? At the very least, they have to have realised that the scientific community has never in history operated that the speed.
If you have people working on a problem for decades, and there are rumors that they have made progress, what is the motivation to independently launch your millions of dollars of AI inference at that same problem?
To me it's not an issue of stolen work, or whether the solutions differ significantly. The extremely poor decision is knowing that there is a (perhaps even many) team working on this problem, knowing they have been working on it for the best part of a decade, knowing that they had very recently made significant progress, and then still deciding to spend millions of dollars worth of compute to solve the problem without them.
I'd suggest saving some of those tokens for some guidance on ethics.