Comment by curt15

> So let’s say OpenAI cure cancer and put every cancer researcher out of work depriving them of intellectual satisfaction, this would also be a problem? It would certainly impact the field.

Would you expect Fields medalists to cure cancer if you moved them from the math department to a medical research lab? This is precisely the fallacy that the frontier labs are counting on to inflate their valuation as their IPO approaches. They want to use headline-grabbing problems in pure maths to make their models look "smart" in the public eye. But what does "smartness" in mathematics really mean in terms of economic value? It is not at all obvious whether success in abstract mathematics should translate to successes and, more importantly, profitability, in more grounded endeavors.

Look at OpenAI's job postings (https://openai.com/careers/search/). Those roles involve far more pedestrian yet profitable duties than research mathematics. So why isn't OpenAI automating them with their vaunted models? Success in one field, no matter how "difficult", does not predict results in another field.