This is my understanding of that part you quoted. It's not really a statment about open vs closed models (which is another very important topic, personally I think open is the only way forward). What he is suggesting is mathematicians will use llms for their research because llms are transformative for math and research. As they work on a problem, OpenAI will put their strongest model on their biggest cluster and synthesize all the work by the individual mathematicians to arrive at the answer.

One big problem here is that OpenAI would be hoarding this ability by 1) not releasing their top models for public use,as we have already seen them do, and 2) limiting the capability of the public API, which we have also seem them do.

This not only kills incentive for math, it means that OpenAI becomes the arbiter of math and research for the world. The research that will be done is the research OpenAI decides to do.

This seems very dangerous to me.

Another path forward is distributed local models. Professors can do research on their HPC machines, individuals can have full access to their models. It's a much more democratic approach.

▲

simianwords 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> As they work on a problem, OpenAI will put their strongest model on their biggest cluster and synthesize all the work by the individual mathematicians to arrive at the answer.

But coming to final answer is not important and that’s what the author spends time arguing. If they are right, surely whatever slop OpenAI is producing is worthless to human understanding which is the main goal.

The math community has to change prestige markers to promote people who contribute to understanding and not just solving theorems and that’s on mathematicians to do.

If solving problems is the end goal then I don’t mind OpenAI doing it in which case furthering math is already solved by someone.

The only failure mode is if mathematicians can’t get funding for just “understanding”. But it shouldn’t be that hard to do if their claim is right that their main contribution to society has always been understanding.

I’d argue that getting funding purely for understanding may be even easier to justify because the costs go down dramatically per unit understanding.

▲

lukehandcool an hour ago | parent [-]

I see what your saying.

The question is, if OpenAI is in charge of all math, what will they research? Ideally they would do things to better humanity, but in the worst case scenario they would research war strategies, weapons development, voter suppression algorithms, etc.

OpenAI, and other similar companies seem to be so profit driven that their idea of research could so easily be perverted to cause net harm to not only the maths communities, but well beyond that.

	▲	simianwords an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Well if they don't research what mathematicians want to research what's the problem? There's no overlap.. The maths community can continue doing what they want and not be bothered..