unfortunately i contacted them on the night of wednesday, september 2nd making the following points 1. i had intel they had information about math work i was doing and a few days before they had spun up a group to try to compete. 2. i emphasized and reemphasized mine was a strictly personal mathematical collaboration 3. that this was a collaboration that had been going on for a year 4. that in my personal collaboration we were happy users of codex as well as obviously claude (and i later complimented astra explicitly after it came out for its help, and reassured i would obviously be sprinkling acknowledgments for it, previous models, and codex liberally in the writeups) 5. that it would look terrible if openai were competing against mathematician consumers, and my collaborator (Tristan) wanted to email about this explicitly 6. that i expected none but in the worst case intended to refuse marketing around the result we were working towards, being the fruit of a personal external academic collaboration, and wanted to express this because i figured worries about such marketing by their leadership was why a team was spun up to extraordinarily directly compete. sebastien and i have in the past months had our fun pushing each other on twitter, but as i process it all i keep feeling bad about Tristan. 1. neither of us could sleep Sunday night, so we went on a walk around the city. i finally asked him why fluids, and he told me it was the navier-stokes problem. he told me parts of the story about his classic nonuniqueness result with Vicol i hadn’t heard yet, and also about how he too grew up writing shaders as a kid and then switched to math 2. tristan is a mathematician’s mathematician. he kept rock solid to his principles during the tense calls and negotiations, immediately turning down a career dream and million dollar prize for me, the sort of strange excited unclear-quasiuseful confused idiot in our collaboration. fifteen minutes later, his feet were up on his desk with three toes per foot peeking out of ripped socks 3. our periodic call after i’d texted him euler blowup was just laughing for an hour or two. just laughing. i’d seen fable deal correctly with monge ampere in the equality case of ehrhart’s conjecture, so in some call before that i’d really pushed him for the craziest shit he could think of that i might try. i texted him the pdf as an update on that “diego luis 3” line, in which following his incredible expression of intuition i hodgepodge slapped together a bunch of our recent work, in particular correcting a bunch of better and lesser known papers in the literature, as well as on diego and luis’ ipm paper, and hoped an analogous construction for boussinesq (thus axisym euler) might work out. i managed to wade through enough confusion to insist to the model it stop telling me stupid regularity stuff about kelvin waves, and a rayleigh-taylor ansatz stuck. like i said, just laughing. when i texted him the pdf, the worst thing either of us had seen so far, i didn’t even comment on the euler blowup claim, only explaining why skepticism should remain for boussinesq, because i found it so shocking. i mean what the hell did i know, i must’ve confused myself by misunderstanding one adjective like i was used to with algebraic geometry. im so lucky to have been able to live that 4. he managed all this this entire time with unclear sleep, timestamps continue to amaze me, due to just recently having a kid it is obvious he deserves the same sort of praise he heaped upon luis, perhaps mutatis mutandis:)