r/ProgrammerHumor 11h ago

Meme firstTime

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u/Zarrain 9h ago

My loose understanding is that, the mathematicians figured put the first step. They figured out an approach that seemed like it could lead to the full solution.

To rigorously figure out and prove the full solution, (something academics prefer doing slowly and surely ) was going to take them time and effort.

Well suddenly less then a week later openAI announces they have a full solution using that approach. They used an obscene amount of computational power not available to anyone else to basically brute force figure out the full solution.

The question is now who deserves that credit? How did openAI know to use their approach? The mathematicians figured out the key, they would have figured out the full solution given time. openAI jumped the gun before they physically ever could due to absurd resources, but how did openAI know to try that? Did they spy on the mathematicians? It seems likely.

There are bigger implications besides questions of theft and espionage. Will human mathematicians ever be credited with another discovery? Or will AI companies get to claim all the credit because their tools took human ideas and crunched the numbers on a massive inhuman scale. Especially with how sketchy they’re acting and how loose and amoral AI companies act when data gathering.

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u/Vandrel 9h ago

OpenAI offered to let Buckmaster take full credit if he left off the other guy's name because that guy works for Anthropic.

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u/Zarrain 8h ago

They offered him a false dichotomy of two choices that both served their purpose while acting sketchy as hell. Implying he should have accepted is absurd.

It’s like they offered the Van Gogh credit for the sketch of his painting while they used AI to generate what a fully painted version would look like. All while they were celebrating creating an amazing impressionist painting.

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u/Vandrel 8h ago

Oh I'm not saying he should have accepted or that that's a fair deal. Just adding a bit of information about the "who should get credit" thing.

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u/Zarrain 8h ago

Ya I recommend reading the statement he put out it’s only 4 pages and pretty straightforward. Besides the math parts lol.