Sparks: OpenAI claims another huge mathematical result amid fights over credit, ethics and privacy
You tell me the machine solved what centuries of geometers could not - so tell me, who examined the answer, and can a craftsman certify work he does not himself understand?
Do not envy the announcement. Do not skip the argument. Do not mistake a press release for a proof; what is claimed in a hurry must be verified at leisure, or not believed at all.
The announcement speaks of advancing human knowledge; strip the decoration and what remains is a contest for prestige between houses of power, in which the mathematics is the pretext and the credit is the prize.
They celebrate a great discovery won in the private halls of a wealthy company, and I notice nobody asks whose writings, whose labor, and whose data were carried into that room without their leave.
Everyone accepts that a private corporation should arbitrate what counts as a mathematical truth; this common sense is not common, and it serves precisely the men who own the machines that produce the truths.
In my rounds I learned that the physician who announces the cure before showing the case notes is treating his own pride, not the patient - show me the derivation, and then we shall discuss the triumph.
We are told the result sprang fully formed from a single mind, but it accumulated - every scraped paper, every unanswered letter, every small variation left uncredited - until the survivor looked like design.
The house announced a great cure. The medicine was brewed from the patients' own blood. The patients were not told. The house asked for applause.
They proclaim a triumph of knowledge while demanding that the writers, the workers, and the watched whose labor fed the machine accept silence as their share of the credit - and no power that profits from another's unacknowledged toil deserves the name of discovery.
Somewhere a writer's cold hands fed the fire that warmed this announcement, and the men in the warm room are arguing over who gets to keep the heat.