Why's that? Do you think that institutions and funding agencies won't cover researchers' use of advanced models, or what? The group I worked in in undergrad had millions of dollars of equipment for doing experiments. I'd have to imagine they could get funding for a few thousand dollars in tokens for the theoreticians to have AI assistance.
That's just money flowing into OpenAI, from the people who used to pay mathematicians.
> Researchers normally don't pay each other to read each other's work.
If reading each others work is symbiotic it makes sense OpenAI is parasitic: whose papers are they reading in return? No-one’s.