People keep calling this "a PR stunt", but from a PR perspective, it seems they went about it in the least PR way possible.
No announcement, no press blast (big orgs have press contacts that they feed big story tips to), they just quietly dropped a blog post and a link to the repo on a tuesday evening.
I get we really want to have some kind of negative framing here, but lets at least not lose track of the ground truth around it. In a parallel universe this was easily headline news that made it to water cooler chat the next day.
Those results were not dumped to advance math. Those results were dumped to generate positive press for OpenAI.
Now it's on actual mathematicians to figure out whether the proofs are bogus or not. But the mistakes will never reach the same level of public attention as the original positive press, so for OpenAI this is good anyway, consequences be damned.
In a sense this is a microcosm of AI usage in the wild, ignorance is laundered through LLMs, and it is left for those that still have knowledge to figure out what makes sense.
OpenAI is a horribly negligent company. The threat it poses to humanity is not that their models will be a superintelligent singularity that will take over the world, is that their negligence and greed has real world consequences that they really don't give a fuck about. Like right now, their shitty math bruteforce is just keeping actual specialists occupied trying to figure out what is bullshit from what is not. For free, mind you.
People keep calling this "a PR stunt", but from a PR perspective, it seems they went about it in the least PR way possible.
No announcement, no press blast (big orgs have press contacts that they feed big story tips to), they just quietly dropped a blog post and a link to the repo on a tuesday evening.
I get we really want to have some kind of negative framing here, but lets at least not lose track of the ground truth around it. In a parallel universe this was easily headline news that made it to water cooler chat the next day.
All that nonsense is expensive and doesn't help their business.
These are not mistakes.
Those results were not dumped to advance math. Those results were dumped to generate positive press for OpenAI.
Now it's on actual mathematicians to figure out whether the proofs are bogus or not. But the mistakes will never reach the same level of public attention as the original positive press, so for OpenAI this is good anyway, consequences be damned.
In a sense this is a microcosm of AI usage in the wild, ignorance is laundered through LLMs, and it is left for those that still have knowledge to figure out what makes sense.
OpenAI is a horribly negligent company. The threat it poses to humanity is not that their models will be a superintelligent singularity that will take over the world, is that their negligence and greed has real world consequences that they really don't give a fuck about. Like right now, their shitty math bruteforce is just keeping actual specialists occupied trying to figure out what is bullshit from what is not. For free, mind you.
I think it's equal parts PR stunt and negging.
People won't want to seriously peer review an AI study unless it's already out there potentially spreading misinformation