Comment by fooker
1 day ago
> I think that literally any academic mathematician could have explained to them, had they asked, why it is considered extraordinarily rude to react to rumors of research progress by desperately rushing to get there first.
Pretty much all of math and science history is basically this pattern again and again. I'm sure all of that was rude as well.
Being scooped is not a new phenomenon, but the scooper's story is almost always that they were working on the problem independently or had some independent insight into it. By OpenAI's own account, they were inspired to start working on this by rumors that there might be Millennium Prize solutions to scoop.
Research projects don't start in a vacuum.
It never happens that you wake up one morning and start working on a new problem that came to you in a dream (*unless you are Ramanujan).
This is business as usual for academia, it's amusing to the discussion over it.
Apologies if this is against the rules, but could I ask if you have some background in scientific research (maybe you could elaborate lightly on topics you've worked on)?
From my perspective, this practice is quite bad mannered, unusual, and heavily frowned upon, but I recognize it's possible that these stories might be more common in other fields. Still, I'd appreciate a strong sign that you aren't making these statements up based on secondhand accounts of what 'academia is usually like'.
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If it's all business as usual and being scooped is no big deal, why was OpenAI in such a rush? They didn't have to launch this effort on the very day they heard the rumor, run "on the order of 10,000 concurrent agents", or try to coordinate announcement scheduling with Buckmaster in the middle of a long weekend. It seems to me that they understood very well this was not a "business as usual" announcement, and devoted huge amounts of money and focus to maximize the chance that they were first.
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