Comment by kevin42
2 hours ago
The papers were all in a 'preprint' directory in GitHub. Academic mathematicians seem to think all research should happen in secret until it's completely proven.
But how much more progress would have been made in the last 100 years if they collaborated in real time? Watching the work someone is doing and spotting errors, or making suggestions would be a good thing. Unless the goal is simply to claim credit for a discovery vs the discovery itself.
It's a little strange to write a comment attacking strawman "academics" with the structure of a partisan political attack ad in response to OpenAI making a mistake.
My intention wasn't to attack academics. I was just trying to point out that being wrong is something that happens all the time, especially when something is in-progress (pre-print). How many papers written by people are withdrawn during peer-review, or while in the preprint state?
If someone had a blog about their research on a math problem, and they figure out one day that what they wrote a week before was wrong (retracting it), would that be a bad thing? I don't think it would be bad, but that's not how academics approach things.
If corporations didn't exist and we all sang kumbaya the world would be a better place, but that's not going to happen is it.
Um, it's called peer review. Dumping random crap as preprints isn't progress.
What are you on about. The papers are held to scrutiny, this is how it works. If you put something out there, you should have done the due diligence of checking it (which is how these errors were found, with their own weaker model!). Being a smug prick about checking results that were announced as progress is less than worthless.