The claim that OpenAI somehow used the mathematicians' ideas to leapfrog them seems unsupported at this time and IMHO it was irresponsible to bring it up because credulous people will immediately believe that narrative.
And from my perspective, if some math folks typing in a few questions to OpenAI provides sufficient training data for OpenAI to solve a big problem... that's amazing! A few conversations/prompts out of the billions that OpenAI trains on lead to this result- that means there is an awful lot of low-hanging fruit that could be exploited cheaply.
The (unprovable, yes, without OpenAI being willingly transparent) argument is that openAI constructed a prompt to scoop them using some inside knowledge about the approach, which they allude to in the announcement.
In the transcripts, Brubeck is very cagey and evasive about the prompt, when it was supplied, and its contents.
I'm curious how many other 300 billion output tokens OpenAI has "paid for" that have resulted in no breakthroughs.
Either they had a pretty good idea that investing this type of money in that compute on a model in training would lead to these specific results, or they gambled with other people's money.
I want to hear about the gambles and expenditures they don't brag about. In America's energy economy, there's finite resources to expend.