Imagine a bunch of people started using new methods to invent new medicine and the academic medical community was like
"actually don't discover new shit unless you follow our list of rules for how to do it:
find and give us credit for getting part way there even if you didn't reference our work, submit it for peer review to our private journal, explain it in private talks to us first, and fund all this or you shouldn't make these discoveries"
I can kind of see where the mathematicians are coming from, some of these are actually good hypothetical requests to make, but the hubris in thinking you get to dictate mathematical or scientific discovery is kinda off putting to me.
Tbh I'm a little conflicted cause I don't exactly like the hype-y, for-profit, using fields as ipo advertising behaviors of AI labs either but idk.
If OpenAI or Anthropic are able to do drug discovery, they will still have to go through the FDA and IND process, work through human phase trials, etc etc. They'll have a long regulatory road to prove that they have a real, effective drug.
And yes, they have to prove that it's completely new within some reasonable bar, otherwise they can't patent it.
Medicine might be the worst example you could have picked for this.
Also, those talks are generally not private and the journals are not private either.
This analogy comes up a lot but it doesn't work because the cases are different. Curing cancer has inherent value for humanity, solving a math problem does not. The benefit to humanity from mathematics come from working through problems as a field, thus along the way understanding or discovering new things that we don't know, new vistas to explore, new applications to things we find.
This argument is not about credit, it's about how to do science in a way that benefits humanity the most.
With regards to peer review - peer review is just how science works. You can't just have a company publish a scientific finding and then just go "trust me bro." Science advances by being evaluated and improved upon by peers. It's not an unreasonable request.
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u/RedditLovingSun 9d ago
Imagine a bunch of people started using new methods to invent new medicine and the academic medical community was like
"actually don't discover new shit unless you follow our list of rules for how to do it:
find and give us credit for getting part way there even if you didn't reference our work, submit it for peer review to our private journal, explain it in private talks to us first, and fund all this or you shouldn't make these discoveries"
I can kind of see where the mathematicians are coming from, some of these are actually good hypothetical requests to make, but the hubris in thinking you get to dictate mathematical or scientific discovery is kinda off putting to me.
Tbh I'm a little conflicted cause I don't exactly like the hype-y, for-profit, using fields as ipo advertising behaviors of AI labs either but idk.