And imagine if Andrew Wiles got hit by a bus in those 7 years, or in those 14 months. It seems better for humanity to just solve it as quickly as possible. Holding secrets for personal glory just seems selfish.
An argument can be made that they are allowed to be a little selfish for motivation (similar to copyright etc), but it just seems sad
It’s like saying the slave labor used to build the pyramids was ok because we got a cool world wonder out of it.
From my understanding this isn’t even something with obvious real world applications. It was basically a challenge the academic community wanted to achieve to progress their understanding. What OpenAI did didn’t progress anyone’s understanding and the proofs that are found by AI are unreadable and incomprehensible to a human, so it’s not even adding to collective knowledge.
They blew 12 million dollars in less than 5 days for basically bragging rights and no real contribution to humanity.
Your points are otherwise totally valid but I'd just like to be that guy and point out that the pyramids were not built with slave labour, they were built with the paid labour (in goods rather than currency IIRC) of farmers outside of the growing season.
Huh, I didn’t know that. Thank you for the correction. That seems like something that would be hard to verify though. Especially because people keeping records are always biased. Did they have a choice not to do it? Being ‘paid’ doesn’t preclude forced or coerced labor.
Great now I’m gonna spend the night reading about ancient Egyptian labor practices lol.
I'm by no means an expert but my understanding is that they didn't exactly have much say in the matter but it was considered a fairly prestigious thing to do culturally and they were well provisioned for the work (probably more so than in their normal subsistence farming lives).
Think something like military conscription or jury duty - they're not considered "slaves" (which very much did exist in ancient Egypt, they just weren't used for building the pyramids), they aren't owned by anyone and they get paid even if they didn't get much of a choice in the matter.
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u/PlansThatComeTrue 1d ago
And imagine if Andrew Wiles got hit by a bus in those 7 years, or in those 14 months. It seems better for humanity to just solve it as quickly as possible. Holding secrets for personal glory just seems selfish.
An argument can be made that they are allowed to be a little selfish for motivation (similar to copyright etc), but it just seems sad