This isn't really about delivering - it's more about helping to understand the shape of problems that AI can solve right now. If they took 1000 problems and threw the model at it and it solved these ten, is there something we learn about these ten problems and the kinds of things that current AI is good at? That's very different from picking ten problems _at random_ and solving all of them successfully, which would suggest a much less bumpy capability surface. It's interesting and it would be good science to release it.

It's not about discrediting AI. We know LLM is a commodity technology like electricity at this point. If somebody in 1900 claimed they had a setup at home where they feed in electricity and cool air comes out the other end (meaning they invented AC), obviously people would want to know what the setup is, so everybody can have AC.

Sure, but I don't really understand what the argument is to _not_ be transparent about methodology, since if the models are so powerful, then doing so would easily support the claims and put these concerns to rest. People are right to be skeptical given what is being implied and the orientation of the narrative

I know it's more exciting to say "AI disproved a longstanding conjecture" vs to say "it did so AND it took several PhD specialists in the field this many attempts to even produce a prompt that got the model spitting out something useful under some configurations, and many iterations to optimize the configurations, and the prompt itself, and many trials with that configuration to solve the problem. All told we spent more than a typical math academic can hope make in their career."

By not being transparent, they invite skepticism and cynical takes, like maybe it's just that tempered and qualified claims are an existential threat to companies that are fully subsidized by the hype train?

I don't know. Either way, it seems like it would be easy to address these, so why should they not do it?

To be clear, even if that tempered version is close to reality, it doesn't make the models not useful! It just forces a certain calibration of expectations

I say this btw as someone who uses these things extensively, including to disprove an old conjecture my advisor and I were stuck on recently. I know they are powerful and that everything is different now because of them. Let's be sober when discussing them though

Yes, but if their machine god really is as good as they say it is, why are they constantly resorting to statistical sleight of hand at best and outright lies at worst with every public statement?

That's not normally how people act when they're confident in their product