They can also greatly assist you.

I am working on two applications using ChatGPT and Claude. I have no illusions these people won't steal/copy whatever you want to call it, "train their models". Yes, I keep unticking the boxes that allow it, that they so kindly tick for me.

But what happened to these math researchers is something else and I am not sure it's about the money for them. You don't do math research to get rich, but to get acknowledged by your peers. Yes, we live in a capitalist world so obviously you need money to feed yourself. but for some people, that is secondary.

OpenAI stole their thunder, and that's just fucked up. It's not equivalent to cranking out a CRUD app for profit.