The pitchforks are out because even without that part, it's still a scumbag move to try to frontrun the mathematicians who were working on this for years after OpenAI heard that they were close to releasing their results. Just identifying that one of these problems is solvable takes a lot of work. The only reason OpenAI got this result is because the mathematician shared with colleagues that he had made significant progress and was close to solving it, and OpenAI could not accept that so they decided to throw tens of millions to make sure it doesn't happen without them getting all the glory. Notice that their paper doesn't even have an author since they're probably all aware of how awful that would look, and no one wanted to take on the shame. They probably also knew that the paper was trash and no one involved could understand it, and didn't even cite many of the people who contributed to all of that knowledge. It's just a disgusting act any way you slice it, even without training on the prompts or the nasty communication by the OpenAI leaders.

At the very least, a company shrugging and saying it’s impossible to know whether academic plagiarism had occurred is a claim that needs to be justified, not taken at face value.

And even if so, it should be on the company to design systems to avoid academic plagiarism and offer the right transparency. It shouldn’t suffice to say “we don’t know what went into the model, when, or how” —- that’s a solvable problem that an accountable company can satisfy.