---
title: "Competition makes scientific collaboration disappear"
date: 2026-09-09
canonical: https://solmaz.io/x/2097527248710692915/
x_url: https://x.com/onusoz/status/2097527248710692915
license: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
---

Terence Tao is afraid centuries of traditions of open science might be undone

But collaboration has disappeared many, many times in the last few centuries

One of the recent examples is physics publications during WW2

Whenever there is winner-takes-all competition like in war or capitalism, scientific collaboration disappears

Corporate research is also like this. Since 2022, OpenAI and Anthropic have published very few breakthroughs that would otherwise give them a winning edge

Compare this to DeepSeek's publications, banger after banger research. They are the exception, but they also did it because they would benefit from publishing, in a vacuum left empty by American companies...

*Quotes a post by @DynamicWebPaige (https://x.com/DynamicWebPaige/status/2097485352529514727); its text is omitted here because it is not covered by this site's license.*