Comment by WarmWash

I'm not sure how you construed that, so let me be more precise.

Mathematicians, as autonomous entities with no formal connection to any AI lab, have zero obligation to do any work for those labs. OAI can't do anything if all the mathematicians band together and say "Sorry, we're not interested".

If they do chose to engage, they are doing so entirely voluntarily, and it would strongly indicate, if they are voluntarily doing it for free, that there is value (i.e. compensation, payment, barter, worthwhile, whatever) to be had by digging in.