Jokes aside, this is a thought provoking quote. I do think it's easy to say as a well known figurehead, when the quote and other actions below you may easily be attributed to you, at least partially. But I do agree somewhat, and I think the context around Truman's time (WWII) is a good example of what humanity can accomplish when the stakes at hand supersede the considerations of workers' rights or credit/ownership. Of course this is also a very favorable phrasing for a period of enormous human suffering. I think there is an arms race analogy to be drawn here, though the current situation and stakes are much different.

'A man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it.'

"QI hypothesizes that a Jesuit Priest named Father Strickland deserves primary credit for this family of sayings. This claim is based on the diary entry dated September 21, 1863 written by Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff and multiple attributions thereafter. However, similar maxims may have been developed independently."

[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/12/21/doing-good-selfless

Amazing how quickly people forget how these AI companies gained their fortune. The whole existence of modern LLM's is due to taking (stealing) other peoples work without attribution.

> what matters is the journey of human knowledge

This is probably a lot easier to accept when you haven't dedicated your entire life to a specific field of research, and then are made significantly less relevant by a machine.

Feel free to replace $clever with any name of your convenience.

R&D and its practitioners are already under mighty pressure to justify their existence, if credit is taken off the table it’s the end of it as a means to survive (let alone comfortably).

--Albert Einstein (Director, Los Alamos Laboratory)

Could you stop this blatant propaganda?

For example, one generally don’t name cells in their body, and cells works generally pretty well to sustain a whole self.

On societal level, obviously no one is aware of who authored the biggest mass of benefit that is granted by the mere fact of living in society. No specific individual have credits for example regarding the language they use daily¹. For the most recent ones, it’s now often possible to attach some name to invention of some cultural/technological artifact, but of course Zeitgeist-wise perspective tend to consider it’s rarely a single punctual individual that should be considered the critical pivot point.

On the other hand, even Marx that was so critical of individual alienation couldn’t refrain to make the intellectual equivalent of pissing territory and attach a name referring to its own ego within all of his works. Ego is a masterpiece of illusion: it will bring the foundational leveraging to build every possible societal hegemony under the sun while convincing the deluded that serving the ego is the indispensable first step of everything to best serve every individual selfs.

¹ Even for constructed languages, such as Esperanto that I practice myself, whoever construct them obviously don’t start from cultural blank slate.

> We reached out to external experts and asked them to act as shepherds, organizing groups to understand the new results. They advised three different release strategies

1. They identified relevant experts for each of the discoveries they wanted to release

2. They collaborated with them to determine how to release the results

The effect for the first two (maths, comp sci) was the same because the experts they chose made that decision.

The downside here is actually the third case (physics). Since they only chose 5 scientists (David Gross, Michael Douglas, Arthur Jaffe, Igor Klebanov, and Nikita Nekrasov) and those scientists chose to keep the results private until they finish their own work. Everyone else who might be interested has to wait.

That was my favouritism aside. Scientists working on similar or adjacent problems that are not included in these kinds of private releases might feel they are not getting a fair chance.

This is a process that will change, but it seems they listened to the anger from the math community and made changes that help address the concerns.

I still can't see what this means for human understanding and how open would this knowledge be. Who'd ultimately get access to this stuff going forward and what kind of power games would ensue hereon.

you're really full of it to assert it's "inevitable"

This.

The truth if the matter is that this is still a publicity stunt. This investment of time, effort, and compute is aimed at building a reputation that this company's model is better than the competition's. The previous publicity stunt brew up in their face, and now they seem to be trying to adapt and double down.

All AI is good for is remixing frontier mathematics, there’s no way it could ever make its own. Right?