I don't get it, but I'm not an academic.
If I dedicated my life to curing whatever, warts... and I'm making progress, but it's slow. And then here comes along this tool (LLM), and I use it, and it accelerates my progress to actually finding some sort of thing that makes warts more prone to being eradicated and then the lab throws a couple of million dollars of computes and lo and behold they eliminated warts. If I leave my ego and identity aside, which of course is hard for humans, wouldn't I be glad that warts is cured?
As a software developer that contributed to open source. Yeah. My code is there. It was the most beautiful code ever written and the labs stole it from me. And now they use it to progress much faster than I ever could. OK. Whatever. It's a tool. I solve problems. Can't I move on from this wart to the next?
To me, and I know this is gonna get me some heat, it just sounds like academics having their identity ruffled and turning their back to progress in the fields that they chose just because they don't get to play their little decades long of coffee, papers and ultimately identity politics.
Edit: never got to negative so fast on this board haha. This board is unfortunately turning, or has turned, to Reddit.
If these accusation are true
It’s more like you spend 4 years developing a product you’re passionate about. This product will gain you the respect of all your colleagues and either earn you money directly or lead to great career advancements. Then OpenAI takes it, changes the colour scheme, finishes the login flow and claims the whole thing as their own.
Not only would it piss you off but it would also misrepresent what OpenAIs models are capable of.
Let's turn this question around.
If I have infinite money to progress whatever problem solution I want but I always wait until I have an unfair advantage to get credit for whatever problem was just at the brink of a breakthrough anyway by sniping the last steps. Am I actually doing a good thing or would it be better to let it run it's natural course and spend the money somewhere it's actually needed?
It's partly empathy with the person who did the work and had it stolen, in a field where the main thing people work for is credit. Maths isn't well paid, and doesn't make things that millions of people directly use.
It's also systemic, it cuts off the supply of results, if there is no reward any more for getting a result, the pipeline of maths will stop. It is the snake eating itself, which has a bad impact for all of us.
We love to do work that is useful and valuable to others, and we often form our identities around this. But identities are in large part socially constructed, so many of us need the recognition of others for our contribution. And it can be very painful when we perceive that the credit for our life's work got "stolen". Naturally, we fight against this. There's nothing shameful there. Sure, you can hold onto an ideal of egoless service. There's nothing wrong with that, either. But it's misanthropic to pass such harsh judgment on people for behaving in such a normal and natural manner.
I suspect in your ideology you're conflating things like copyright and patents, with the separate issue of Attribution.
If, as you say, it doesn't matter that the AI company gets praise for somebody else's discovery, then it also wouldn't matter if the praise went to the academic. You apparently resent the academic for seeking praise instead of being content with anonymously advancing human knowledge, but you don't resent the AI company seeking praise while leaching off the academic.
And I could dedicate my life to helping feed starving kids all across the globe. And then comes along this tool (a lockpick) and I use it, it accelerates my progress to actually getting money to fulfill my dream. If you leave your ego and identity aside, which of course is hard for you, wouldn't you be glad that I stole your money to feed starving kids?
An academic's whole career is built on credit assignment for research breakthroughs. If someone else takes the credit, you lose. This is fundamentally different from a builder. You create things, solve problems and get paid for that instance. Nobody cares you 'invented' the blueprint for that building method. Your job is to instantiate. 100 Contractors can be building instance the exact same building somewhere else, it would not affect you. Most of IT builders are paid for what is basically 2 or 3 tier CRUD.
HN loves drive-by downvotes. It's a real shame.
I stand by what I said, and screw you.
Downvotes might work as an abuse sponge, absorbing the impulse to make personal attacks. Other than that possible advantage, the downvote functionality seems contradictory to the concept of a discussion forum, I agree.