Nobody is going to care that the math isn't being done in the traditional way. The results speak for themselves, this is now a part of the landscape. No amount of hand-wringing is going to put the cat back in the bag. Adapt or perish.
We can and have put some ugly, hissing, spitting cats into bags, some of which weren't even in one to begin with:
* Chattel slavery is illegal, and the vast, vast majority of humans agree it's appalling it ever wasn't.
* Food manufacturers in the US are no longer allowed to put highly-dangerous additives to their products and hide the fact.
* Women are allowed to vote.
* Ten-year-old children are no longer being maimed and dying in American factories.
Claiming it can't be done is either fatalism or propaganda for execrable companies whose evil has rarely been matched in the history of capitalist business.
Do I have a clear solution for how to stop the insanity? No, not yet, but that is not a proof there's no way to do it.
You can of course choose how to spend your time in this world, but I don't see the value of either 1) assuming we're screwed and giving up before trying to fight, or 2) shilling for lying assholes like Sam Altman.
If there's a distinction being made between "using AI for math" and "the particular methods being employed by OpenAI", I think that's splitting hairs. The core of the issue is that math is being done outside of people's heads by a different thinking system and they're worried about the implications.
If you look at something like the EPA (or the FDA as you mention), it is true that certain uses and side-effects of technology have been identified to be detrimental to society and have been restricted, but this letter doesn't seem to be in that league, it really seems like sour grapes to me. Dumping toxic chemicals into the water table is one thing, saying "we don't think people will learn from these methods in the same way that they traditionally have" doesn't hold as much water to me.
Perhaps I'm looking at this from a too zoomed-out or detached perspective. I'm just thinking about the concept of the technology at play and its future impacts regardless of who owns or controls them. But maybe that's naive. In today's connected world you can't separate those things, and I think I'm understanding that a lot of the outrage here is more about the socioeconomic implications of a big corporation suddenly "disrupting" a field that was largely owned by more altruistic academic institutions.
I do still think that the internet, despite largely being owned and controlled by the powers that be, has represented a great shift of power and agency to the individual, and is ultimately a socialist construct, and we will continue to see those changes over time, and that AI is an extension of that.