Comment by happa
8 hours ago
But that exactly how human mathematicians do things. They upload their research to preprint services like arXiv as they await it to be peer reviewed and accepted into a journal. Why is it okay for mathematicians to publish preprint papers, but when OpenAI does it, it's irresponsible?
The difference is that human mathematicians wouldn't post it online, claim they have achieved some proof, and then check after publication and announcing the results to the world. You would always check your work first, then publish it. It's not about preprint vs peer-reviewed. That of course is normal practice, it's the high-profile claims that are being made that are the problem here. They just blindly published results produced by the LLM, with 0 due diligence.
Yes they would, in many fields it is (was?) normal to post a preprint and leave it up for the next year while the handful of other people working on the topic digest it and agree on whether it’s right or not, before even submitting to a journal. Sometimes the others would find an isssue in an argument and you hopefully manage to fix it or potentially retract / not submit to a journal.
You may want to read beyond the first part of a sentence. Yes, preprints have always been a thing. The claims and publicity around the potential findings are handled differently here. That's where the issue is.
> is that human xs wouldn't y
This is wrong for a strikingly large percentage of xs and ys
exactly, cf andrew wiles first proof of fermat's last theorem
Yes, cf indeed. He did not publish it, he shared it privately and then spent the next year correcting it before publication.
ok, that said there has alaways been a bunch of "maybe theorems" it's was a thing even in paul erdos books i think. now we have "maybe proofs". still better than "no proofs"
See DDOS. That's exactly how humans access a web page. Why is it okay for humans to access a webpage, but when a bot swarm does it, it's irresponsible?
That's an analogy among many others, but the point is that OpenAI should use their tools responsibly. If they have 700 potential ground-breaking but unproven results, they should share it in a way that they do not get free (possibly unwarranted) publicity for it.
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