So then they DIDN'T "learn the secret to cracking the problem". They simply knew that part of the problem was solved. Knowing a problem can be solved and knowing the solution are not the same thing.

The claim that OpenAI somehow used the mathematicians' ideas to leapfrog them seems unsupported at this time and IMHO it was irresponsible to bring it up because credulous people will immediately believe that narrative.

And from my perspective, if some math folks typing in a few questions to OpenAI provides sufficient training data for OpenAI to solve a big problem... that's amazing! A few conversations/prompts out of the billions that OpenAI trains on lead to this result- that means there is an awful lot of low-hanging fruit that could be exploited cheaply.

So because they didn’t admit to it they didn’t do it?

I like how the comment below summarizes it:

> learning the answer might be in model X’s training data made them believe that model X specifically might be able to solve the question, and they were able to very quickly find enough certainty about the former to commit millions of dollars to the latter.

They don’t need to know, because their IP stealing machine knows for them. They just have to buy enough compute, and someone else’s work is theirs.

Yeah, and suckers are born every day...