Comment by ndriscoll

The symbiosis here isn't I'll read your paper and you read mine. It's I'll publish my results and you publish yours. Groups share results and cross-pollinate ideas. If people don't want to read OpenAI's papers, no one's going to make them. If no one's interested in the ideas that OpenAI is coming up with, everyone can just ignore them.

The problem people are having is they clearly are interested. They think the ideas are good. In fact, too good. If they thought otherwise, they would just say it's all slop, no one cares, business as usual. And you can tell that there's this phase change in their behavior because previously you could ask chatgpt about math and it would just give you word salad and everyone knew that. Now we can all see that it's not just word salad and people are scrambling to figure out what to make of that. Obviously an accurate answer oracle is still strictly useful even if it makes no attempt to tell you why (you can even use it only to help prove your boring technical lemmas when you have ideas!), so obviously this is an emotional reaction, not a rational one.