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.

> 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.

The symbiosis here isn't I'll read your paper and you read mine. It's I'll publish my results and you publish yours. Groups share results and cross-pollinate ideas. If people don't want to read OpenAI's papers, no one's going to make them. If no one's interested in the ideas that OpenAI is coming up with, everyone can just ignore them.

The problem people are having is they clearly are interested. They think the ideas are good. In fact, too good. If they thought otherwise, they would just say it's all slop, no one cares, business as usual. And you can tell that there's this phase change in their behavior because previously you could ask chatgpt about math and it would just give you word salad and everyone knew that. Now we can all see that it's not just word salad and people are scrambling to figure out what to make of that. Obviously an accurate answer oracle is still strictly useful even if it makes no attempt to tell you why (you can even use it only to help prove your boring technical lemmas when you have ideas!), so obviously this is an emotional reaction, not a rational one.

That's just money flowing into OpenAI, from the people who used to pay mathematicians.

Okay? Again, when I was in my group, money would flow to Nvidia to buy GPUs that we would use to run simulations (in addition to the experimental devices I mentioned). The researchers could also request money to use for openrouter or build their own GPU cluster if everyone thinks it's good use of funds.

Shouldn't we pay for the best tools if it helps researchers to be more effective?

You are arguing with people who have AI do 80% of their job yet are still convinced that the labs are the ones capturing all the value.