Sam Altman's statement on the Navier-Stokes dispute
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Re: Sam Altman's statement on the Navier-Stokes dispute
#2"The guy that works for me is great, everything is a coincidence, we were just trying to be generous, of course we're acting with integrity and would never do anything bad." - the least surprising CEO PR statement ever.
Re: Sam Altman's statement on the Navier-Stokes dispute
#3I think the personal drama aside, the moral of the story is: If you are working on an interesting breakthrough in any domain amenable to AI-supported solutions, make sure to keep it secret, lest a more well-resourced party (in particular the leading AI firms) will try to front-run you on the results by throwing millions of compute at it.
I guess (pure) mathematics will eventually be left alone, since own its own it is not economically valuable and OpenAI and Anthropic will eventually not need it any more for publicity, leaving the normal researcher alone to pick up AI-supported crumbs again.
But this also doesn't bode well for other domains. I think these are the clear signs of power concentration in the hands of the AI labs. All future progress will go through them, and if it doesn't, it's only because they graciously let you and decided not to scoop you first.
Re: Sam Altman's statement on the Navier-Stokes dispute
#4"The guy that works for me is great, everything is a coincidence, we were just trying to be generous, of course we're acting with integrity and would never do anything bad." - the least surprising CEO PR statement ever.
He also decided that it was appropriate to say "The team threatened us with unfounded accusations of plagarism." Which has to be the absolute height of irony on both the counts of plagiarism and threats given that OpenAI has effectively admitted to likely plagiarism with their deliberate non-answers, and explicitly admitted to threatening them.
Re: Sam Altman's statement on the Navier-Stokes dispute
#5what happened to the lowercase letters in his writing? was this generated by cgpt?
Re: Sam Altman's statement on the Navier-Stokes dispute
#6That sounds a lot to me like a lie.
Re: Sam Altman's statement on the Navier-Stokes dispute
#7I think the personal drama aside, the moral of the story is: If you are working on an interesting breakthrough in any domain amenable to AI-supported solutions, make sure to keep it secret, lest a more well-resourced party (in particular the leading AI firms) will try to front-run you on the results by throwing millions of compute at it. I guess (pure) mathematics will eventually be left alone, since own its own it i…
I agree with everything you said and I wondered... Isn't this just the next level of the concentration of discovery in universities and science labs?
Centuries ago, going perhaps only as far as 19th century, much of science was done as a hobby by people who had the smarts and the time (which was a luxury).
Over time, the cost to do science increased gradually. What required just a few hours of free time started requiring many hours. Then money to make small machines. Then big machines... Then it became out of reach for almost any private individual.
Now it's out of reach for anyone who doesn't have data centers full of GPUs, even major universities depending on the field.
Re: Sam Altman's statement on the Navier-Stokes dispute
#8He does seem to have rather upset some people over this,
example: https://xcancel.com/BetterCallMedhi/status/20974723362578637...
Re: Sam Altman's statement on the Navier-Stokes dispute
#9I think the personal drama aside, the moral of the story is: If you are working on an interesting breakthrough in any domain amenable to AI-supported solutions, make sure to keep it secret, lest a more well-resourced party (in particular the leading AI firms) will try to front-run you on the results by throwing millions of compute at it. I guess (pure) mathematics will eventually be left alone, since own its own it i…
What is your opinion on the proof of the Four Color Theorem?