>What is a terrain worth exploring in art?

The joys of parenthood. The excitement of new love. The tragedy of aging. The rise and fall of a great family. Jealousy, vengeance, embarrassment, righteousness, venality. You obviously couldn’t create an all encompassing map of the terrain, but human art has a lot of recurring themes that are clearly “worth exploring” because they’ve consistently been explored in the past. I think the same kind of repetition probably also exists to some degree in other areas of human endeavor. An artificial intelligence could probably suss out a lot of those themes and produce valuable (if not maximally valuable) work without being a mind reader.

Sometimes I wonder if "art" is also just some form of pattern matching on a very meta level.

Not a chance. They'll go for room temperature superconductors and other stuff that is currently in the quite possible but not yet proven and patent the hell out of it and charge rent to the rest of humanity.

> I expect their motivation for devoting resources to solve these problems will dramatically drop as soon as they IPO. Maths is just a convenient vanity metric for OpenAI to demonstrate progress, but long term progress in mathematics has no commercial value to them.

And why would IPO remove incentive that's present pre-IPO? Somehow math progress will influence price at IPO but won't influence stock price post-IPO? Or will they just stop caring about stock price once they are public. None of these options makes any sense.

Eh, I'm sorry, but math being a vanity metric is not at all as factual as a take as you present it as. Maths are just a convenient target to improve their models through RLVR, using verifiable endpoints (ie. lean proofs) to generate novel training data. The publications and vanity stuff is just a side effect of their primary motivation: making the model better.

Putting the fear of looking silly ahead of fear of human extinction or other nefarious consequences that could happen with that God-AI is way sillier.

Going about your job/life despite a looming threat is a different level of resignation than telling others not to worry and giving them a false sense of hope not because you truly understand the danger to be fake but because "what else am I to tell them? the truth is too horrible to bear" isn't actually doing anyone a kindness: it is going out of your way to make the jobs of those who would tell you the raw truth harder.

If you go to the doctor and they understand there there is a chance you are going to die but, when you come to them for advice on your pain, they look you straight in the eye and insist that you will be fine if you just eat some more fiber, they rob you and your family of a not only a chance to prepare and grieve but the motivation to fight the inevitable.

To your analogy, if you think we might be on the brink of a war that might massively effect your life and so you go to the wise guru who assures you you will be fine if you just duck and cover in the basement, they are, frankly, part of the problem, as they are making the war sound "not that bad", when if you understood the threat of thermonuclear war you might be protesting in the streets.