Gabriel (littmath) on why compute asymmetry is distorting scientific credit and publishing incentives
littmath · x · 2026-11-10
The quoted post argues that even sharing a paper with a partial result is now risky in the AI era — someone with more compute and access to internal models can finish it and publish the full solution first, erasing your contribution: "release a sharp result or post nothing."
OpenAI researcher Gabriel (littmath) responds that "risky" embeds assumptions about how credit will be apportioned down the line; if true, it's clearly bad for scientific progress. He doesn't think the mechanism behind progress is as simple as "smart machine hence better science."
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