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Thanks for linking the statement, saved me a search for it.
The problem is AI fanatics literally use this as their doomsday goal post. It's never "Expert + AI" spend large amounts of compute and combined intellectual prowess to solve hard problem, create bio weapon, hack every system in the world etc. It's always "I'm worried some pleb is going to type "lel give me smallpox x10, make it incurable, make no mistakes"". By that same metric this is a loss for them because it did require a "centaur". Hell it really required a humanoid-hydra-centaur where its a dozen human heads on a single horse torso.
As always, maximalists gonna maximilize, nobody ever got famous/stood out from a crowd by making measured, subdued, realistic predictions. Follow the incentives.
Apply the intermediate value theorem. If AI started 2026 much worse than human mathematicians, and (hypothetically) by the end of 2026 AI is much better than human mathematicians, then at some point in 2026 AI capabilities pass through the point at which they are useful but still need human mathematician assistance to reach their full potential.
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Yes, I think this is right.
And I actually think this is a good result for AI:
If you put those pieces together, they paint a picture of a better future where you still have your job but maybe an AI-assisted pharmaceutical cures your cancer, and some disgruntled terrorist in a lab running a jailbroken local model is going to have a much harder time making smallpox x10 than that AI-assisted team of PhDs is going to have synthesizing a cure. That's...pretty great! I can be excited about that future!
But to your point about incentives, I think OpenAI wants to blur the line between "we threw a million monkeys at a typewriter to solve a fabled mathematics problem" and "you can do this on your computer at home" in part because of marketing (and ideological hype about the future of AI). They want investors to think that what they will get in their browser at home is the same product as the one that solved Navier-Stokes, which is misleadingly true.
Somewhat relatedly, OpenAI recently reported that their project to build an automated "research intern" was a success...that now cost them $600 per day per median researcher to run. I don't think this means that OpenAI's automated investor is worthless - in some fields it might be worth every penny! - but it's not going to be replacing the literal ~free labor interns that I work with and once was.
So I think there's a convergence between how OpenAI wants you to see their product and how the doom-mongers want you to see their product. They are both framing it in grandiose, infinite-return-on-investment (either negative or positive) terms and not asking you to look too hard at all of the little nitty gritty details such as "where would an escaped AI swarm get enough compute to subsist outside of its servers?" or "how much is it going to cost me to solve Navier-Stokes at home when the investor cash dries up?"
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