9 ms·

Drama/accusation summary: - Aug 15th: Tristan Buckmaster & Levent Alpöge make progress on a few important math problems, "finite-time blowup with smooth forcin

• deleted 9d ago
  [deleted]
• tecleandor 9d ago
  Thanks. I was pinging some people near the mentioned Córdoba to see if they had any insights, but no extra info yet...
  • Betelbuddy 8d ago
    You should call El Niño, he lives close to the Mexican border and is at home after 6...
    • Betelbuddy 8d ago
      Well people you fail again...I am sorry for you.... "Mr A. Nino weathers a storm of protest" - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/mr-a-nino-weathers-a-storm-of-protest-1148017.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/mr-a-nino-weathers-a-stor...
• onidj 9d ago
  It seems exceptionally unlikely to me that OpenAI would be "reading user prompts". More likely is a leak somewhere else. Obviously Anthropic/OpenAI are engaged in espionage stuff with each other. I am guessing Levent just mentioned something to someone at Anthropic and it got out.
  • simianwords 8d ago
    why is this downvoted? do people really think OpenAI is snooping at people specifically? like they are looking for good leads into new problems or ideas and they found this guy's codex thread and used it? come on man, even for conspiracy theories this is stupid.
    • gcr 8d ago
      this is a highly marketable problem and specific teams at OpenAI were aware of specific competitor efforts. I would be surprised if this were happening on a large scale, but 1. Less than a hundred people in the world are working at this problem, 2. A significant fraction of those happen to work at competing hyperscalers, 3. Those hyperscalers repeatedly show themselves not to take user privacy seriously
      • simianwords 8d ago
        I'm not sure what your points 1 and 2 have to do with anything. Both directionally increase the probability of hyperscalers also finding the solution independently. > Those hyperscalers repeatedly show themselves not to take user privacy seriously where? Any examples?
        • hn_acc1 8d ago
          Have you been living under a rock? None of the big tech companies care one bit about user privacy in the US.
          • CamperBob2 8d ago
• singularity2001 9d ago
  Ignoring the drama, when can we expect the lean proof of this great sensational discovery?
  • bhouston 8d ago
    > Ignoring the drama But the drama here is a little important. Stealing the millennium prize for N-S is sort of a big deal, especially to those who had been working on it for the last few years.
    • dandanua 8d ago
      Attempts to steal $1,000,000 for a solution to Millennium Prize Problem have become a tradition, apparently.
    • Drblessing 8d ago
      The math is all that matters.
      • duped 8d ago
        That's a very sad way to look at this
      • jere 8d ago
        Math, like any other human endeavor, doesn't exist until someone is motivated to invent it. The laws of the universe aren't understood until someone is motivated to discover them. So it might be worthwhile to not completely ignore discussion about incentives.
        • tough 8d ago
          Both mathematics and the laws of the universe exist way before any understanding kicks in
          • jere 7d ago
• modeless 8d ago
  > After hearing of the rumor, OpenAI started researching Navier Stokes with a new internal model. I don't think this part is accurate. OpenAI was researching Navier Stokes before. It's possible that they started on a new approach after hearing of Tristan's success, however that is not proven and I expect we will hear OpenAI's side of the story today.
  • n2d4 8d ago
    You're right — the wording in the doc is that the "first prompt" was sent after learning about the rumor, although this might be the first prompt of this solution approach, not necessarily first prompt to any Navier Stokes solution.
  • loose-cannon 8d ago
    In the PDF: "The route to the Clay problem through a smooth force, options c and d in Fefferman’s statement of the problem, is the route Luis and Diego opened and the one Levent and I had quietly chosen to attack. Almost nobody else I know of was working on it. It is not the direction one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement. When I heard “forced,” it was a bright red flag." Whether or not they were researching it before isn't the concern.
    • treis 8d ago
      This seems unsupported. OpenAI has access to internal models that the general public doesn't have and a compute budget that dwarfs what an NYU professor would have.
      • mswphd 8d ago
        it's very possible they only had to use the massive compute budget because they were trying to plagiarize his work before he published it though, e.g. autonomously do things in ~7 days what he had likely been thinking about for ~1 year.
        • treis 8d ago
• Davidzheng 8d ago
  But Tristan doesn't even want to be credited for the millennium prize--does he? He wanted to be the first to solve it and got scooped (which ig is not a great look for OAI ethically but also not forbidden). And the only reading for her of asking to remove levent must be in light of this offer (to credit him for millennium prize) right? It's not like they can ask him to remove levent from the main papers without this offer(what would Tristan gain?) My guess is that OAI tried to be "generous" and offered to share credit on millennium with Tristan but not Levent. And Tristan got understandably offended by this offer (which probably oai felt like was the right thing to offer but they couldn't really offer to do the most ethical thing for some reason) and then the random conflicts and weird threats started.
  • lukewarm707 8d ago
    my reading was that openai did not deny plagiarising the approach from their prompts. openai then tried to effectively bribe buckmaster with a shared citation, whilst dropping his co-author who works for anthropic. after buckmaster refused, openai tried to threaten him.
    • Davidzheng 8d ago
      Oai denies looking at prompts but doesn't deny training on them.
      • lukewarm707 8d ago
        if they do not deny training on them, they can't deny plagiarism.
        • fc417fc802 8d ago
          By that logic everything any LLM spits out is plagiarizing the vast majority of work written prior to a few months ago. That doesn't seem like a useful or desirable line of argument to me.
• deleted 8d ago
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• bawolff 8d ago
  > OpenAI says they would partially credit Tristan for the $1,000,000 discovery (even though Tristan did not solve the $1,000,000 problem) — but only if they remove Levent as an author, as he works for Anthropic well that sounds like an asshole move.
  • mti 8d ago
    In a serious discipline like mathematics, this isn't just an asshole move, but a career-ending level of academic misconduct.
    • augment_me 8d ago
      *In the old discipline of mathematics. We are in new times, where capital and compute decides mathematics, so we don't give a shit anymore
      • hardbass 7d ago
        What is your view on the proof of the Four Color Theorem?
        • deleted 7d ago
          [deleted]
        • augment_me 6d ago
          Don't know enough about it to have an opinion, is it related to this somehow?
          • donkeybeer 6d ago
            [dead]
          • hardbass 5d ago
            You implied you weren't a fan of capital and compute driving math. How would you feel about a result that required 1200 hours of time on a powerful mainframe computer?
• sigbottle 8d ago
  It's specifically the last two bullet poitns - Tristan is suspicious of the timing, as only few others were trying this approach. OpenAI says the model didn't access his user data directly, but leaves unanswered whether Tristan's chat conversations were part of the training. - OpenAI says they would partially credit Tristan for the $1,000,000 discovery (even though Tristan did not solve the $1,000,000 problem) — but only if they remove Levent as an author, as he works for Anthropic. These two bullet points are extremely suspicious if you were honest. Like I'd imagine for OpenAI, they'd love to pump their chest and not even give Tristan credit - "no, we did it, GG mathematicians". It's this weird hedging half-assed measure, especially with the desire to remove Levent, that makes it suspicious.
  • colinhb 8d ago
    I think it's very unlikely that Tristan is making up these quotes, or pulling them out of context: > I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.” Whether and how OpenAI's work on this problem was contaminated by knowledge of Tristan and Levent's work is tangential to OpenAI bullying other researchers into adopting their narrative and dissociating with dis-favored collaborators (ie Levent at Anthropic). Though the latter behavior (threats, intimidation) may weigh against OpenAI in trying to understand the former issue (contamination).
    • deleted 6d ago
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    • CamperBob2 8d ago
      >I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.” If this is true he should release the actual emails. This is a very serious accusation and he shouldn't demand that the reader judge it on hearsay.
• lukewarm707 8d ago
  please could you change 'drama' and 'accusation' to something more formal like 'allegation'. the paper makes a very serious allegation of dishonesty and possible academic misconduct. the governance and integrity of openai is of importance to the welfare of society. this is not a matter of drama.
  • ryan_n 8d ago
    The [lack of] integrity of OpenAI (and any other frontier lab) should already be pretty solidified. Among other horrible things, these companies stole millions of IPs and no one seems to care anymore. Regardless of what you think of the product they are making and the success of ai/its impact on humanity, these companies objectively do not have much integrity.
    • simonw 8d ago
      How do you feel about the integrity of the machine learning researchers over the past twenty years who trained models on scraped internet data that weren't particularly powerful and didn't attract any attention?
      • lukewarm707 8d ago
        i think that this case, if they did train on buckmaster and alpöge, amounts to an attempt to steal the millenium prize, bypassing all attribution. legally speaking, the default privacy notice gives them an irrevocable license to your content. they may read and use the prompts for research. so it is very possible they simply stole the navier-stokes solution. that is the same principle as any other prompt but this would be a concrete example. there would be some difference between simply giving the model some prompts to read, which they are entitled to do on the default policy, and putting it into aggregate training data.
      • ryan_n 8d ago
        If they scraped internet data in the same way as current day frontier labs do, then I feel the same exact way about them. Why would I feel any different if that is the case?
• Betelbuddy 8d ago
  In other words...they should have used Bedrock...
• alas44 8d ago
  From OpenAI's post https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/ https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/ "Since August 28 we have been training a new internal model that has exhibited unprecedented performance in our benchmarks, including mathematics. This model’s training is ongoing and its performance continues to improve." "When a further trained version of our internal model became available over the course of the effort" "While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models "
• epistasis 8d ago
  > OpenAI says the model didn't access his user data directly, but leaves unanswered whether Tristan's chat conversations were part of the training. This sort of cagey half-answer is highly suspicious and indicates that yes OpenAI did actually "access user data directly" because they are only willing to say that the "model did not access user data." That has a very specific meaning, the model looking up user chats, that they can defend. So, everything we submit to OpenAI can be considered to be part of future models, right?
  • rzmmm 8d ago
    Isn't it obvious? Web scraping and even scanning written books is at record levels because the data is so useful for training. They are using every byte of user data.
  • kccqzy 8d ago
    OpenAI says > While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models That basically means, we don’t know, and we hope the model didn’t look up user conversations, and the best thing we can do is hope. That’s seriously disgusting. I can understand why on a technical level why perhaps it is impossible to answer what exactly the model had access to, but it still is disgusting.
    • mahart 8d ago
      Every other paper in existence has been ingested with 99% of writers not knowing it will be retroactively used for training. But session data which is disclosed as being used in terms of service is disgusting? If the work is duplicative/derivative then the preprints they put in sessions can be shown by the users and we can see.
      • epistasis 7d ago
        What's disgusting is that they refuse to acknowledge what they and only they know: were these chats fed in to the new model that found these results? Nobody would be disgusted at following stated policy, that's doesn't make sense, without first objecting to the policy. But you're bringing up distractions from the actual concerns: did OpenAI use the private chats and why won't they confirm or deny it?
• yk 8d ago
  The last two points are disputed/sound significantly more reasonable in [0]. So from what I gather, Buckmaster realizes sometime during the call that the biggest result of his career is going to get steamrolled (the blowup of Navier Stokes is a much bigger deal than the blowup of 3D Euler), and on the other hand the openAi guys realize that they are basically talking about internal results with Anthropic and probably have to call corporate right after this call. Between these two stressor the conversation appears to have gone somewhat poorly. [0] https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310
  • jamiecruise 7d ago
    I think this summary captures the interpersonal and cross organization dynamics nicely.
• m00x 8d ago
  I haven't seen any proof that OpenAI asked Tristan to remove Sebastian from the prize. Until we have proof of this, it would be wise to offer conclusions. Same for NS validity. This was not validated by the community yet.
  • applicative 8d ago
    you can read it in buckmaster's document.
    • wbl 7d ago
      And OpenAI confirmed it!
  • mepiethree 8d ago
    what would such proof look like? It's not like allegations are written in Lean
• deleted 8d ago
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• someothherguyy 8d ago
  its what all LLM users have all been doing, profiting off others' IP through a number cruncher, while relinquishing their own
• wraptile 8d ago
  > but only if they remove Levent as an author, as he works for Anthropic. What a terrible look for OpenAI to die on such a tiny hill right there. I wonder whether Anthropic would have made the same requirement.
  • mepiethree 8d ago
    well they didn't really die on the hill. the NYT headline is still "OpenAI says it has cracked one of math's millennium problems" and the whole article doesn't mention this controversy. Normies don't know what NS is and don't care, they'll just see "wow OpenAI is the best I guess"
• HWR_14 8d ago
  I don't understand the desire to remove Levent. "Off the clock, when Anthropic engineers want to break new ground, they use ChatGPT" sounds like a great ad.
  • menato 7d ago
    All these small details will be forgotten in less than a year. But association "Navier-Stokes -- OpenAI" will be part of the history. In my opinion, they are thinking about long term PR here.
    • HWR_14 7d ago
      That association seems like it will survive the actual names of the authors, regardless of who they are. But I'm not a marketing person.
• WinstonSmith84 8d ago
  Well, regardless of the drama, the interesting part on Anthropic vs OpenAI is: - One of the two main persons work at Anthropic and "almost" or "partially" solved the issue, but eventually didn't succeed - An external person with just an excerpt of the chat and certainly less versed in Mathematics (than these 2) tackled the problem. There is little doubt that OpenAI is so much ahead and maybe the gap is even larger than what we see on Astra vs Fable.
  • grey-area 8d ago
    Often with a hint on how to solve something, solving it is much much easier. It seems like that's what happened here. Very weird behaviour from OpenAI, offering partial credit to on person, but not the other person involved. Trying to bully the mathematicians involved (see threats quoted upthread). I suppose it's the sort of amoral behaviour we've come to expect from them.
  • pfbtgom 8d ago
    I recommend that you read the linked PDF before drawing any conclusions. This is sort of a weird interpretation: > One of the two main persons work at Anthropic and "almost" or "partially" solved the issue, but eventually didn't succeed - It wasn't an Anthropic endorsed effort. - Solving this class of problem means a march of progress A -> B -> C -> D. If a student turns in a test that jumps from A -> D without showing any work they're either brilliant or cheating (probably cheating). Further, each step of progress isn't the same proportion of effort. What if moving from C -> D was actually the smallest contribution and just required a novel perspective to make the breakthrough. This part is wrong: > An external person with just an excerpt of the chat and certainly less versed in Mathematics (than these 2) tackled the problem. - it was a whole team at OpenAI working on the problem - it wasn't a chat excerpt, it was more like their entire git repo and project progress reports
    • cbarrick 7d ago
      > it was a whole team at OpenAI working on the problem Well, a whole team plus $15 million in compute spend. (That's what OAI would have charged for the same number of tokens.)
• saidnooneever 8d ago
  people are so greedy to have their name on something forgetting a) human progress is shared through its cycle. people build upon eachothers ideas and knowledge. and b) all these models consist of information stolen from others. Who really solved it if all u did was prompt some illegally obtained repository of data..?? Its like saying you won the car race, but you stole the fastest car and had your m8 drive you around the track.
  • ncr100 8d ago
    To build on this, is it correct to say ANY training on data from any individual originating human deserves to be cited and attributed on the solut6paper? I wonder whether these bickering users (of AI various products) with math degrees are missing the forest for the trees.
• woadwarrior01 8d ago
  > - Levent works at Anthropic, but this research was independent of his work there, with a mix of GPT and Claude models. One minor wrinkle in Alpöge's narrative, he refuses to deny that he hasn't used any non-public Anthropic models for his "independent" research. https://x.com/giffmana/status/2097560503581069585 https://x.com/giffmana/status/2097560503581069585
• api 7d ago
  I was kind of okay with the sequence until: "OpenAI says they would partially credit Tristan for the $1,000,000 discovery (even though Tristan did not solve the $1,000,000 problem) — but only if they remove Levent as an author, as he works for Anthropic." There it is. Nobody "owns" math but that's petty and shitty.
• nautilus12 7d ago
  This should be a watershed moment for everyone using a commercial LLM. EVERY PIECE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY YOU DISCUSS WITH IT BECOMES THEIR PROPERTY. FULL STOP. It is impossible to fight against this. It is statistically obfuscated, they can just argue it is a derived work.