Comment by 405error
4 hours ago
I can give you some context. 1. Terence Tao's mastodon explains the way this problem was solved does not in itself contribute much. LLMs (and in this case) produce massive, often unintelligible proofs that do not further understanding. It is often that in pursuit of solving these problems, many other discoveries are made. 2. There is a more serious question about scooping. If OAI is using chat data from researchers to make discoveries, essentially every researcher who chats with an LLM can get scooped. You could be 80% of your way to solving a problem, and LLM could solve the remaining 20%, and get all the credit. Years of your work could be scooped in an instant. If you're a PhD student, this is even worse. Here it's a world famous problem. But imagine you're a PhD student, working on your small but extremely career/progression critical problem, and you get scooped by an AI you talk to. No one is even going to care.
1. I know, but that is somewhat irrelevant to my question 2. I am indeed a CS PhD student (well, I am finishing now)
> If OAI is using chat data from researchers to make discoveries, essentially every researcher who chats with an LLM can get scooped
But they make very clear that they do train on this if you do not disable the setting. We can comment on the fact that this is opt out instead of opt in, but this discourse of OAI sniping the solution out of some researchers hands seems to be running on the best case speculation of the researchers having perfectly handled all their chats and discussions with other researchers and the worse case of OAI not having full pipeline control and I think that is an unfair assumption.