I'm bitter about the outcome too, but doesn't it seem like Paul could have _easily_ made a plan for the museum's continued existence or the donation of the computers into worthy hands? I can't see any scenario where the billionaire cofounder of Microsoft wouldn't have had those plans had he wanted them..so I can only conclude he _didn't_ care materially about the importance of the computers separate from himself.
I agree that it would have been trivially easy for him to give the museum a long-term future. I wouldn't jump to any conclusions about what he cared about.
Some might surprise you. I brought my Altair over to a friend's house and his clever 5th grade son was enthralled by it. I explained binary numbers and how to convert from binary to octal. Then I taught him some basic 8080 assembly instructions and he was entering his own programs on the front panel shortly later. I wrote out a basic program for adding two 8 bit integers and without my explanation, he figured out converting decimal <-> octal and chose some numbers you might expect from a 5th grader, like adding 6 and 7, and choosing two numbers that summed to 67 in decimal.
Achievement aside, the framing of this and the previous Claude achievement with the Jacobian conjecture don't sit right with me. They make it sound as though there is just some truly automated problem solving process underway at these major labs yielding novel math results on their own without human engagement. The OpenAI post [0] itself on this says "claiming human authorship for a proof generated entirely by an AI system would misrepresent both the system’s contribution and the nature of genuine human intellectual work." That's true only if there was _no_ human prompting involved to yield this result. In the case of the Claude result on the Jacobian conjecture, the employee who obtained the result _is_ a mathematician.
It seems to me that a mathematician is in a much better position than a lay person to construct prompts and engage with an LLM in a way that results in a new mathematical result. If he could work with Claude to obtain the counterexample but I cannot, that highlights the importance of the prompt engineering from the person, and their knowledge to do so. I'd be surprised that he was the first person to ever prod Claude to work on that particular problem.
Since they don't elaborate on the prompts or method that yielded the result, I'm unable to assume it was a fully AI driven approach. From that lens, I find the framing disingenuous.
