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this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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for one, the term AI has become loaded and anyone using it has to know what kind of baggage comes with it. but for another this isn't just anything with AI. it's OpenAI specifically. this is not just a neat science thing it's a company doing indirect marketing and whitewashing of their tech. trying to get a better image than what i and many think they deserve.
so yes people will not want to let this type of marketing and image whitewashing happen will downvote.
i hope this is the nuance you were missing. it doesn't change anything on my dislike for this tho. as cool as it might be if you ignore everything else that surrounds this headline.
The nuance I was referencing is that there's a difference between LLMs being used for consumers and capitalism as a whole, and AI models solving 80 year old mathematical problems. This is what this new technology is best used for, for solving problems no person or computer could solve up until this point. If you're going to shit on everything because AI bad, then you're advocating for a world in which science progression grinds to a relative halt. AI is also excellent when it comes to analyzing healthcare data, particularly at identifying cancer. If you were being assessed for cancer, would you tell your oncologist to not use any AI software to help them diagnose? If so, I hope you enjoy literally dying on that hill. If not, you're a hypocrite who should acknowledge that sometimes AI is good for something, even if that's the exception and not the rule.
This case of AI models solving mathematical problems is a happy little accident falling off a wagon of problems. This new technology, if it were developed to solve mathematical problems, wouldn't do nearly as much harm. Alas, the only mathematical problems OpenAI care about are from the realm of Game Theory, applied to corporate decision-making and boil down to "how do I make the most profit relative to the other players?"
It's like bombing a city to show off your cool bombs, finding a hostile in the rubble and pretending he was your target, as if that would justify all the other people you killed. And now you're going on about the way bombs can be used to kill bad guys in the context of a bomb manufacturer that doesn't give the faintest fuck about the bad guys, nor about the children they also killed, so long as the bombs are being bought.
Yes, of course AI can have good sides. Are you really surprised that we're more concerned about the bad ones right now though?
Like what?
...all the stuff they mentioned? OpenAI burning our future for profit, fully aware of and entirely unbothered by the sheer evil they're inflicting, and now presenting their wonderful achievement as a "look, AI can do good (too)!"
Just because it brought a little benefit ("this headline") that doesn't justify the collateral damage of the work it happens to be a side effect of ("everything else").
I don't actually know what you are talking about. This isn't about the waste heat of data centers, right?
You mean the evils of OpenAI in particular and the ongoing large-scale LLM hype in general?
Well, data centers outputting exorbitant amounts of heat is one part, yes. That's the most literal reading of "burning our planet".
Communities suffering water shortage because a data center diverts half the municipality's water to quench that heat is another.
A more poetic reading is the future they sabotage:
Companies are fucking over workers, firing existing ones and no longer hiring new ones for a short-term profit, causing long-term damage to the job market. By the time they figure out that the people they lay off can't actually be replaced by bots, there are a bunch of people looking for job: the laid-off workers that couldn't find a new job because other companies likewise stopped hiring, as well as the new graduates that are looking to enter the job market.
Between that increased supply of workers and the financial damage companies suffer from that mistake, wages may well get pushed down, probably without the cost of living following suit. This means more financial pressure, a greater power imbalance between employers and employees and overall a shift in power towards the rich that don't suffer to nearly the same extent.
Speaking of the rich, there is one particular group of people that will profit from this: those selling AI.
People who have become reliant on their tools will be reluctant to return to working without them, or even find it difficult to do things they haven't had to do on their own in a long while. So a lot of them will pay. Businesses in particular will be weighing the cost of dropping those tools versus paying for licenses. There is also a human factor of admitting you were wrong and throwing good money after bad one (sunk cost fallacy, if you've heard the term).
All of this means they'll have a good angle to start squeezing for money. Add on the usual bullshit of hidden fees and predatory pricing models and you've probably got people paying out the nose. They can and most likely will sell data gathered from the interactions people have with their tool.
By the time the mistake becomes evident, they'll have made off with the money everyone else has been giving them to fund their own self-destruction.
OpenAI specifically is aiming to go public, making their Initial Public Offering this year, meaning they will eventually be obliged to start generating profits for the shareholders. They've worked hard to get people hooked on ChatGPT and its siblings, to convince everyone that AI (specifically: LLMs) are the future, done nothing to remedy the misconceptions about the actual nature of LLMs, still haven't installed functional safeguards against people asking their text generator for advice on how to kill themselves or others. They were the vanguard spearheading this hype with ChatGPT and they'll keep pushing it for as long as there's cash to squeeze from rubes.
I'm not even starting on the social and psychological cost. They're harder to pin down, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. But just the ecological and economical damage this company (among others) continues to cause is immense.
In that context, their finding a solution to a mathematical problem is a faint achievement, like a killer helping an old lady across the street on the way to continue their slaughter on the other side: nice in isolation, but not enough to weigh up their evils.
(And if I may be particularly cynical, if this is used to show that AI can render yet another job obsolete, it would be closer to pretending to help, then pushing her over.)