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Comment by pfortuny | Hacker News Reader

I do not know about this but, to be honest, he (or his Dpt, or whatever) has the money and connections to try the hidden-behind-closed-doors stuff.

We mere mortals (I am a prof. of Maths at Uni) do not.

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I won’t downvote this thread but … the first paragraph of the article explains how Tao won some $3m award. Unless the going rate for AI-shilling is much higher than I can believe, the amount of money just is not going to be enough to get a world-class figure to suddenly sell out. If you saw him selling his morals regularly in the past, ok I’ll listen to the evidence. But suddenly now? After so long writing (essentially for free) and building community? Doesn’t make sense.

A $100,000 investment into Anthropic or OpenAI a few years ago would be worth a couple hundred million today, so $3m is ~nothing in that scheme of things.

I don't think Terence Tao sold out. However, just looking at it from OpenAI's perspective, this kind of advertising is almost certainly worth at least one order of magnitude more than $3M to the company.

I'm a Terence Tao fan, but yes, OpenAI should at the very least just be telling him to go crazy with the latest models on our dime.

No, I am not saying he has sold out: but he has the money and the contacts to see the insider-only version.

Just that. Tell my Uni to pay me 200€/month for tokens. They are just going to laugh it out.

This is my view as well. It's not like it's weird for people to get paid for things they genuinely believe in even if they were nor paid.

Maybe he’s just friggen excited about the possibilities. I’m a developer by day, and even with the pending doom of our whole craft, I’M EXCITED about what AI not only has already done for me but what I’m going to be able to do with it in the future.

Here’s one of the smarted guys who’s walked the earth, and out of his historical peers, he’ll be part of the first generation with big brains AND to have tools to give literal superhuman abilities.

Come on… TT doesn’t care about a little money for a biased plug. He could literally knock on the doors of Renascence Technologies and walk in with a straight face say “give me 1% of the Medallion Fund, I start today, an office with a nice window if possible”. And it would still come off charming like he always is.

Thanks for not downvoting the thread I guess, but I don't think that's how it works. If you take someone's money to say their product is great, even if you genuinely believe it, you shouldn't be trusted. There is such a thing as conflicts of interest after all and it is not measured by the amount of interest; not least because it's hard to know what that means. It suffices that there is interest.

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