Are Ai Companies Using Llms As A Reception Funnel For Mining Open Source Research? If They're Not, Should They Be?

I, like many of us, don't only use LLMs to complete menial work. Sometimes, I chat with it and just analyze the system itself, feel out how its tone changes over a few turns of teasing, that sort of stuff. Other times I will have an idea that I want to bounce off somebody who has more information than me, introduce me to a research direction, some body of established literature, or just pass along the name of a concept.

Occasionally I will have an idea that I communicate to it, something genuinely from me, that I'm sharing with it. It could be a simple observation on something, or a more meaningful description of how I intend to accomplish a task, and I ask for feedback.

The *one* touchpoint that modern people have right now is AI. Every interesting idea, every research direction, every "hey, what if..." is basically being funnelled into a chat box.

So on one hand, Anthropic, OpenAI, etc, have enormous power to do statistics on this data. They could figure out shit like, are there ideas that keep showing up over and over? Are users distinctly converging on areas of research?

And, just because an idea doesn't show up a bunch doesn't mean it's not relevant, either. Einstein may have bounced his initial thoughts on relativity off of an LLM at the time if one had existed. They could develop a flag in their system that says "hey, this guy is sending something cool. get someone to look at this."

So basically, the interesting step ends up being, while we are using AI to answer questions individually, the company hosting the AI ends up with a monolithic body of knowledge. Which, their business is in improving the AI. But what about the guy on the other end who built a better mousetrap? What about the person with a proprietary technique co-developed with an LLM to make their stuffed crust 10% cheesier, who never had the money to back their results with a research paper?

The next question ends up being, if these companies can extract huge amounts of half formed, but still valuable thoughts, and have the power to continue them on behalf of the society submitting them... Are they entitled to them?

How many of these "solves unsolved research question in science or mathematics" are going to have been trained on cutting edge research by human mathematicians that people are submitting in the chat, for example?

Just thinking out loud.