Was on the bike thinking about the whole mathematics/OpenAI thing.
Alan Watts: if we approached music the way we approach capitalism, the conductor who reaches the last note first would be the most successful. And the musician writing the shortest songs would win. Obviously silly. But is the journey is as important as the result?
Someone in a thread said a proof is only really valuable if you can explain it. I agree. Otherwise it's slop. Math slop?
But here's the conundrum: what if it works anyway? Throw brute force, money and machines at it, and out comes the actual record-shattering thing. Nobody can explain how.
Someone told me part of the payoff here would be physical prediction models weather forecasting for becoming orders of magnitude better. So you could argue: skip the drama, the back-and-forth, unlock the benefit for everyone, and let only the people whose job it is care about how we got there.
Basically, what if the slop solves world hunger?
And at the same time: the human version of this is years of grinding. You invest your time, your relationships, long stretches without reward. Even the million-dollar prize is nominal once you count opportunity cost.
These three, four, five researchers could have slid up the bell curve into a fund job and made that money anyway.
The most heartwarming part of the post that kicked all this off: the guy mostly said he shouldn't be credited, that it should go to his dude over there. Incredible sportsmanship at very high stakes.
Fast-forward 30 years. Are those researchers financially safe? Taken care of?
Risking your private time to hack on a problem for years IS risk. Spinning up 10.000 agents as part of a marketing budget is not at all risky.
Anyways, all of this is making me think harder about my own work and whether the techniques and methods I apply to my research are actually healthy ones.