As for #2, personally I feel like OpenAI's results are superhuman at this point. I don't think there's enough human talent alive right now to produce these sorts of results within a few years, no matter the budget.

There are lots of reasons I believe this. One is that frontier AIs are very clearly superhuman on shorter problems (as can be seen on benchmarks like FrontierMath, or just by playing with them yourself if you have a source for difficult problems)--so these achievements are "just" scaling that advantage to research-sized problems. Second, AI is also clearly superhuman in its knowledge across fields, so it can make connections and combine techniques that humans won't be able to access. Third, these problems are famous and have withstood efforts of many of the best humans, in many cases being considered unapproachable.

Altogether it seems like AI is not only smarter but also more cost efficient that humans for math-adjacemt problem solving. I'm not saying that AI is superior at everything in math, eg theory building, but I think it's really unlikely you could get any group of humans that could compete with OpenAI's latest results.

>1. How much did it cost?

>2. Would an equivalent allocation to incentivize human effort have borne the same results?

Unlike their initial massive brute-force run that solved the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, most of their subsequent breakthrough results in mathematics have come from a single prompt to a single AI agent, using approximately 3 hours of ChatGPT Pro-equivalent thinking compute per result on average.

1. some bad hack for the switch2 took 2 weeks of non stop work for an AI, so most certainly this was expensive.

2. most probably no, the AI doesnt rest and its very very fast.

3. also no, they are doing this for aura farming which then will result in more money for them, the money will dry as soon as this stops working.

The problem with point 2, is that person couldn't then work on other things. And there's a limited supply of people of that capability in the world.

We're now at stage where we can turn energy into thought to generate expertise on demand.

> 3. Post IPO, will Open AI continue allocating similar levels of capital to further these causes?

I think the scarier alternative may be OpenAI forever gating their super-frontier models, capturing a significant portion of the sciences and leveraging it for equity in businesses that build on scientific advances. e.g. "Hey CATL, how about you guve us 5% equity in exchange for a battery chemistry breakthrough our AI has found?".

It's roughly equivalent to the playbook Palantir had for the public sector when they marketed themselves as a company that had cracked data science. At least that's what they've been pitching back then. I can't find a lot on public disclosed deals based on that.

Just wanted to say that these questions would indeed be great to have answered, or at least discussed. It's weird how cultish some people get.

1. it comes from VCs philanthropy, who cares?

2. it wouldn't happen so who cares?

3. no, but models will be better, it'll be cheaper to do

It's not a snark. The scale of VC philanthropy is unprecedented and it fuels itself. All of it will eventually, one way or another, become open. Long story short – there is nothing to complain about.