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Comment by loose-cannon | Hacker News Reader

dude, proper attribution is part of scholarship and academics. Not giving credit to the people whose work led up to your solution is malpractice.

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I did not say a thing about attribution. This specific case might be a slam-dunk. The takeaway I got however was that the methods mathematicians use - they wanted some sort of rights to it. I no longer can access the article to quote prompted me to understand it that way, but to me that screams we are now approaching the next level of absurdity in patenting

A lot depends on the concreteness/vagueness of the idea.

"Just use some polynomial" would be an idea so generic that it wouldn't merit attribution. "Just use a cyclotomic polynomial of degree 24" is a lot more concrete.

(I have no idea where the exact limit lies and I have no idea how precise or vague were the ideas in those discussions.)

These kinds of responses aren't helpful. Your response essentially muddies the water because it sets an artificial standard that nobody can/will meet. Yes, you're correct. There likely is some grey area with how we decide to give credit. Are we talking about the same story? This isn't "a polynomial". This is a research program that has been ongoing for years or possibly decades with nontrivial contributions. If you're not sure what does or does not deserve credit, you should engage with the community instead of suggesting that the idea of giving credit is "vague".

I used to be a young mathematician once.

Hashing out a problem is a complicated thing. From the point of the AI, or another person, even a negative suggestion ("I tried computing those Jacobians and they showed nothing of value") can be very helpful in steering you away from non-productive paths, but we rarely attribute such negative suggestions in print, we may not even remember them.

All in all I think that OpenAI should have mentioned using material from those people, but I would also like to know what material and to what extent.

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