Let me give you some perspective: my entire phd was made obsolete by CRISPR. It was a wonderful thing.

This happens all the time, even without AI. Other researchers or PhD students can publish the same results before you. I say that based on my experience during my PhD.

Use whatever is published as the new base for your research. Use AI tools to help you going forward.

This has always been a challenge for PhD students and researchers, it's just far more likely to occur now it seems. Getting scooped doesn't feel good, but it's a signal you've been thinking about things other people care about.

I think eventually companies won't get as much stuff that's usable for marketing, so they'll stop investing so much into ai for math, so eventually cheap and poor graduate students will be able to do relevant work again without worrying about getting scooped by a company with a million GPUs :-/

Verification is equally important, if not more so.

Perhaps consider switching to a more applied field. Experiments in the physical realm hold value, especially if you document the process.

> what do I do?

Very hard question.

Your work makes you one of the very few people who really understands the problem and solution and its significance.

It could still be interesting if your approach to the problem was different to theirs.

Don’t paste your research into these AI because they will train on it and then scoop you.

Don't worry, if you use openAI and get lucky they might offer to share credit with you for your work.

> what do I do?

Precisely what all NLP researchers and the ML community at large did in the last few years: embrace the frontier and realize that attention is all you need.

Ask OpenAI for money when you don't have a job or future?

I guess the only answer is to adapt with the tools. If we can't do that, then yeah, we're in trouble.

That’s always been a thing, it’s called “getting scooped”

That would be unfortunate but the world does not owe you anything and is not going to stop for you. Which is also a valuable thing to learn in your 20s (ideally earlier).

Look forward to being obsolete I guess

Yes, and?

> Let's hypothetically say I'm a PHD student who is half way through my studies and I have a halfway written version of one of these "preprints" - what do I do?

I did get my PhD...before AI. And my honest advice (to myself back then, even) would be: quit the PhD, become an electrician, and work hard to buy a tiny house in the middle of nowhere to watch the world burn in this madness.