Separate from all the allegations of more nefarious actions and ethical issues, that’s the most charitable version of what happened here.
And according to them at some point they saw that one was close to being solved, so they pointed all the agents at it.
The same thing happens to humans - at this time there are no simple problems left, so solving the hard ones requires using prior knowledge and attempts at solving things.
> "Of course we don’t know whether that is true"
Yep. Who is verifying these claims? We all know how trustworthy Altman & Co are.
A better example would be playing chess against a player slightly stronger than me and using a chess computer to suggest some good moves. I could win, but it certianly wouldn't be just my brain that wins. It would be an amalgamation of my brain with a machine that suggests good moves.
One cannot simply reason by analogy.
My iPhone keyboard does
This likely doesn't happen exactly on an analog keyboard, but then many text-processing environments that do the same thing in post. My keyboard just edited 'yuor' to 'your' even though I successfully input the prior string.
Professor says the assistants - why don't you dig in this direction, I have a hunch it might produce something valuable. And AI assistant does just that, proving or disproving a hunch. This would take the professor a lot of time if doing by themselves.
If I write a book and pass it through a spelling and polish checker, I still wrote the book and its core IP. I didn’t “rely on” the tool to create the IP.
The OpenAI effort was a pure brute force attempt. I'm not even sure an LLM was actually involved. I think they just used their hardware to run the matrix multiplies required by the search for a counter example. Perhaps some clever approach guided the search but that seems to be about it.
Work on something novel -> llm is kinda useless and low value-add -> Keep at it and in the process feed it more information -> keep doing this periodically -> a few months go by and you realise the model outputs are almost like-for-like regurgitations of what was inputted in some prior period.
Once it’s accumulated new info can it produce something automated that is somewhat useful? Sure.
But by itself - absolutely not.
I clearly see humans will be needed - the best ones that is. For ‘rote work’ and stuff that is not IP sensitive firms will be ok with employees putting that as inputs into models.
But I’d wary about trusting the labs. They will push the letter of the law to the max.
Personally I’ve stopped doing anything novel with these models. If I do use a model on something adjacent but not totally novel I have to craft the inputs in a strategic way not to give much away.
I’d wager firms will soon realise this and that growth rate of revenues of the frontier labs will become questionable. The economic cost that firms have brought out thus far is only financial. There’s a whole bunch of other costs people aren’t talking about.
I guess I'm having trouble unraveling your experience and personal usage vs. what you're concluding about the labs.
To avert that dynamic, the frontier labs must deflect and otherwise act to prevent this controversy from breaking through. Both to the general public, but also more specifically to the firms' decision-makers. All of whom are generally aware of the IP issues, and some of whom are aware of what happened with Cursor and Figma, but with few exceptions have not yet themselves acted to protect their property.