The “least worst” representation of the course of events is that their researchers are just jerks, and not behaving in a manner that’s considered acceptable in the research community.
Other alleged scenarios just go downhill from there.
They were surprised another competitor had not wastefully thrown $20 million+ worth of compute at a problem they had no business solving in the first place?
That's reaching, imho.
They didn't know what they were doing and they pumped a bunch more carbon into our atmosphere because hubris basically.
Shame on them.
1. This is not the first time they have done these “hey guys check out this breakthrough!” announcements where others quickly came along and say “hey, not so fast.” (Eg Erdos) So, specifically in maths their reputation is not good.
2. They’re blurring the lines between commercial cutthroat developments and the gentlemen’s code of sorts re what’s acceptable in academic research. They were working from material non-public insights into other research, which is why they even tried to poke at this in the way they did. Doing that without collaborating first was a pretty jerk move no mater how you slice it.
3. There’s still lots of open questions about how novel the solution was and the timing here where this “test” only happened after other researchers say they fed OpenAI models at least part of the solution is a little too convenient to gloss over. OpenAI statements here to date on the matter have been rather fuzzy.
All that combined with OpenAI’s less than stellar reputation on ethics is why folks are reacting the way they are right now.
And that is a good thing! Competition moves us forward much faster than sitting on results to avoid hurting someone's feelings.
Legit competition is of course good. But taking what was arguably a leak and then using that divert massive sums of compute (not available to the other researchers that were using their systems) to then get ahead is where it gets ethically dubious.