Post by @lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems

2026-09-08 14:46 UTC

Glad to see that OpenAI has not changed in their scummy ways. Despite all that has changed in the meantime, they have kept their time-honored tradition of passing off other people’s work as their own. One of OpenAI’s math announcements a month ago claimed that their results cost only $2000 worth of tokens, which frustrated me because they were likely sweeping away many inconvenient details and almost certainly misrepresenting their true costs. But people took this as a gotcha. This is the same bullshit as the water usage arguments. We are literally seeing city council members signing motherfucking NDAs about this, and you think that water usage numbers provided by the tech companies themselves are going to sway me?

Replies (2)

@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-09-08 15:04

yeah I think the push for math results is because they know some of their big investors know enough about how hard/advanced math is and they want to impress them. Burning down an entire academic community is worth it for that

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@scruiser@awful.systems 2026-09-09 01:31

I am also questioning OpenAI’s strategy of strip-mining math for PR, since it seems like advances in math do not actually register that well in the public. They want to sell the claim that they’ve “achieved AGI”. For the general public they can sell on the vibe of “the computer talks back to you”, but for more sophisticated audiences, they need something firmer. Everyone with even a fraction of the ability to think for themselves has stopped trusting benchmarks, so OpenAI and Anthropic has been looking for things associated with intelligence they can claim success on. Math proofs have the property of being somewhat automatically checkable, having lots of ideas scattered throughout the literature to let their LLMs sift through, and being associated with intelligence.

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