Apologies if this is against the rules, but could I ask if you have some background in scientific research (maybe you could elaborate lightly on topics you've worked on)?

From my perspective, this practice is quite bad mannered, unusual, and heavily frowned upon, but I recognize it's possible that these stories might be more common in other fields. Still, I'd appreciate a strong sign that you aren't making these statements up based on secondhand accounts of what 'academia is usually like'.

CS PhD, used to be a professor, have worked at several industry research labs since.

> this practice is quite bad mannered, unusual, and heavily frowned upon,

Yes, it is.

Maybe you missed my point?

The fact that is "quite bad mannered, unusual, and heavily frowned upon" does not stop it from happening, and it is common for all high profile inventions and discoveries.

This does not disqualify the person doing the scooping, history remembers them as having the credit, and quietly forgets the person who was scooped.

My initial read of this

> Pretty much all of math and science history is basically this pattern again and again. I'm sure all of that was rude as well.

was that you were trying to suggest that it wasn't. It seems we actually share similar views here then? I cannot say anything about how common it is, since I've been pretty lucky when collaborating I guess.

I meant that it's very common when it comes to high profile discoveries and inventions.

If you have made one, and there was never any dishonest competition, you have indeed been very lucky.

I haven't, but the history of science is rather nasty.

They were working on it for almost a year, and Buckmaster has evidently been interested in Navier-Stokes for a while. This seems to be more of an innocent collaboration between two researchers than a strong company PR effort. Maybe Anthropic should have stepped in and made a large team to help them finish the proof (and maybe they tried and didn't succeed, who knows).

If what he wrote is accurate, it does suggest that OAI is effectively extremely hostile to cutting edge researchers (eg, if we hear rumors about your partial success on a problem that has huge PR benefits, then we'll assemble a strike team of researchers with unlimited compute to claim the win for ourselves, possibly by training on your data). It's also not a good look for them to request author removals based on company affiliations.

I think what you have in mind is more appropriate for more normal corporate projects and the like. But academic collaborations are not usually so political/'profit' driven, if that makes sense.

This follow up idea is a fun one! Not likely I'll have to be teaching a course like this again, but I will suggest it to some people I know.

I feel like there's an overly negative vibe to this response when it just seems like rubber duck debugging - I would assume the user isn't trying to argue like how you might have to argue specs, but is merely trying to clarify their own ideas and learn possible alternatives.

Thanks for sharing this. It's unfortunate that the more honest framing about the value of mathematics that he suggests is going to be really, really hard because of all the pitfalls and agendas he mentioned here. I can only hope when the dust settles something will be left.

pretty minor since the rest are fine but your linkedin link is broken

oh indeed it is! thanks for the heads up!