OpenAI in fact didn't know what to do with results and didn't want to flood the world, so they asked mathematicians. Mathematicians recommended OpenAI to release them. My guess is it would have been better for OpenAI if they didn't release them. OpenAI is basically doing this as a goodwill.

(See https://agmai.org/general-sep29/ for the recommendation in question.)

People seem to have very misguided ideas about why OpenAI is doing this at all. It is not to brag or to torture mathematicians. It is an eval. OpenAI is known to be willing to pay large amount of money to get a good eval, think FrontierMath. FrontierMath is now saturated, so they need a replacement eval for math. Open math problems are actually a fairly good eval, although a proper eval is better (eg FrontierMath has known difficulty and have tiers from 1 to 4).

Mathematicians would prefer if OpenAI didn't use open math problems as an eval, but OpenAI is not obliged. I actually think OpenAI wouldn't point AI to open math problems if unsaturated FrontierMath Super Duper is available, as it just angers mathematicians, but such eval is not in fact available. Given OpenAI used open math problems as an eval, they could just throw out the result (this is in fact better as an eval since it will keep problems useful longer), but mathematicians preferred to see the result. So OpenAI released them.

Yes, they should. They have invented a magic button that can tell you the long-awaited answers to the burning mathematical questions that you've spent your life researching. The caveat is that the technology is still new, so the explanations "are not fun to read" like set theory papers usually are (lol). If you don't think that's a worthwhile tradeoff, that's your call, but it sure as hell isn't everyone's.

They should certainly be allowed to share their findings. No one is forcing scientists and mathematicians to review the findings in general. It’s just the case that the findings are of such such a quality that it would not make sense to ignore them wholesale

The best part is that when the academics fix OAI’s issues, the model gets better and OAI shareholders get richer and more powerful!

As someone who uses LLM tech occasionally, this is why I prefer using open local models. If I’m making myself obsolete, at least I’m not making some asshole richer and their closed model better.

No, they don't have to ask. Those interested enough will jump at the opportunity, even if it's just to be "one of the first to get it".

You know, I kinda relate to the feeling of not wanting look at those outputs if I think of it from a layman's perspective.

I just imagined that instead of math papers, they released 700+ feature length films, and the only way to tell if one of them is any good is to watch it in its entirety.

That feels pretty unappealing to me.

I know it's the same for human made films, so what's the difference right? But those are good enough most of the time that it's a decent bet, and the people that made them had real skin in the game.

Contrast that with something made by a nondeterministic slop machine with no skin in the game where small details can be off in a way that's jarring. Right out the gate I have an aversion to committing that much time to something that very well may waste it.

What else should they do? See these models get smarter and smarter, somewhat-solve things but only to the tune of 90% what mathematicians (or experts in any other field) would deem acceptable, and then gate keep the findings for the next few years going through peer review and paywalled journals? I for one welcome the flood, bring on more in every possible industry and see where all that progress lands up. Sure it will upset a lot. A lot of things also upset the luddites.