We do have rules in place for animal testing in the pharma industry for more or less ethical reasons, so it's not unheard of use it as an argument to either stop or incentivize a company to do something. I agree that it is nuts from the point of view of actually changing anything, at least now.
Yes and if they were keeping mathematicians in cages that would be a good point. These are the same mathematicians who already agreed to work with OpenAI, who were apparently okay with how the models were trained but were concerned about how they night be used. Which sounds fair in the abstract, but concretely it means that they didn't care about intellectually property rights until it was their own jobs on the line. Many such cases.
It's just an identity and job security crisis for these mathematicians. Very similar to software engineers over the last 1-2 years.
They'll learn to accept reality sooner than later. Software engineers are still employed. In fact, I'm busier than ever since coding agents hit mainstream. My job is just different now but it's for the good overall.
These mathematicians will also figure this out.
Asking OpenAI to stop testing advanced math on internal models and stop discovering solutions is just crazy talk.
