I won’t downvote this thread but … the first paragraph of the article explains how Tao won some $3m award. Unless the going rate for AI-shilling is much higher than I can believe, the amount of money just is not going to be enough to get a world-class figure to suddenly sell out. If you saw him selling his morals regularly in the past, ok I’ll listen to the evidence. But suddenly now? After so long writing (essentially for free) and building community? Doesn’t make sense.

I don't think Terence Tao sold out. However, just looking at it from OpenAI's perspective, this kind of advertising is almost certainly worth at least one order of magnitude more than $3M to the company.

A $100,000 investment into Anthropic or OpenAI a few years ago would be worth a couple hundred million today, so $3m is ~nothing in that scheme of things.