[staticshock]

You're surprised they didn't eat the tokens to churn on lots of open problems instead of asking others to pay for those tokens? They're in the token business. If they're eating the tokens, it's in support of a marketing effort, not in support of innovation across the frontier of all the other academic disciplines. The collective frontier is way too big for them to just "solve it" without asking society to at least help them break even on such an enormous public good.

[wrsh07]

It's also much better to distribute the challenge of identifying problems amenable to which prompts

Could they do it? Sure, but to what end? It would make more people hate them and feel even more "take our interesting work." Pitching it as a useful tool just makes more sense on all levels