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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

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 9d 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 9d 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.
  - magicalist 8d ago
    > If this is true he should release the actual emails these were statements while on a call, and at least the career comment Bubeck has admitted to while doing damage control ("I deeply apologize for this extremely poor choice of words, it is the opposite of what I was trying to convey. (I should say that I retracted them on the spot by the way.)"[1]). [1] https://xcancel.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310 https://xcancel.com/SebastienBubeck/status/20973794116915163...
    - dgellow 8d ago
      What a horrible response from Bubeck. How did he think that would make him and OpenAI look good to tweet that?
      - ignoramous 8d ago
        If we're allowed to arm-chair judge harshly: It isn't uncommon for those (anybody) on the cusp of "greatness" to be delusional when challenged: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-to-know-about-main-character-syndrome https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-to-know-about-main-c...
        fn-mote 8d ago
        Who here is on the cusp of greatness?? Or thinks they are? I really don’t understand which party you are referring to.
        CamperBob2 7d ago
        Anyone who comes close to solving a Millennium problem can honestly say they are on the cusp of greatness. Not sure what this question proves either way.
      - adastra22 8d ago
        Did we read the same tweet? It felt very forthright and level-headed to me. Not at all what I expected.
- johnnienaked 8d ago
  Sounds like a great time for open mathematical research is upon us. /s
viccis 9d ago
>After hearing of the rumor, OpenAI started researching Navier Stokes with a new internal model. This is the most suspicious thing to me. If their chat data were available to the corpus to be trained on (I thought they claimed not to do this?) then it really might be as simple as querying the model with "describe recent work from Tristan Buckmaster" and it will spit out this problem and his approach. No need to directly read his user data. This is basically just scooping, real scumbag behavior.
- rakejake 9d ago
  OAI doesn't need to mention Buckmaster's name directly in a prompt. They just need to select a basket of sessions that is guaranteed to contain Buckmaster's and then direct the LLM to attack only a specific method/angle. This is trivial to do while maintaining plausible deniability about not using his work.
  - spongebobstoes 8d ago
    what reason do we have to believe that they did this? both things were proved by AI, isn't it logical that they could have very similar approaches? it is common that multiple people essentially simultaneously prove/invent the same thing I see zero evidence of wrongdoing
    - j16sdiz 8d ago
      This depends on what "proved by AI" meant. Was that a one shot prompt? or something guided by human, step by step? If that's the later, it won't use the same approach when not guided by the same human.
      - efavdb 8d ago
        Apparently Tristan was working on this problem for years, with AI providing help. Vs OpenAI spending a week with their new model, potentially having access to Tristan’s work.
    - 8d ago
hkmaxpro 8d ago
Both Sam Altman and Sebastien Bubeck admitted they only want Buckmaster to be the lead author on a rewrite of the OpenAI proof. https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140 https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310 A wake up call for using OpenAI models. If you discover something with their model and you work for a competitor, they “felt it would be inappropriate” for you “to author OpenAI’s work”.
- derangedHorse 8d ago
  It sounds like OpenAI is trying to appease the author when they don’t have to by allowing him to rewrite their proof. They probably don’t believe he deserves to, so him asking for a coauthor from Anthropic might overextend their grace in their eyes.
  - nezi 8d ago
    Given that Tristan has said that the proofs that LLMs come up with are mostly "slop" and not up to the standard that human written papers achieve, maybe OpenAI needs an expert like him more than you think to get the result published?
    - fn-mote 8d ago
      Almost certainly the Lean proof needs to be decoded for humans and probably also made “human intelligible”. Now maybe LLMs can also simplify arguments and make sense of them for humans, but we haven’t seen that yet (unaided). (I haven’t looked at it, personally.)
    - nl 8d ago
      It's a Navier Stokes solution. They don't need any help publishing.
  - reverius42 8d ago
    He's not "asking for a coauthor from Anthropic"; he already has a coauthor, who he's already been collaborating with, who happens to also be employed by Anthropic (but whose research in this area is not done as part of their employment at Anthropic).
dgellow 8d ago
If that part of the PDF is true that’s so disgusting, psychopathic behaviour > 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.” Some time later Levent received a text proposing that he and Sebastien speak one on one, saying, “I don’t know if Tristan is being fully rational right now.”
- AnimalMuppet 8d ago
  With "rational" being defined as "not making us look bad" at best, and "letting us take credit for their work" at worst. Yes, that is disgusting.
- 27183 8d ago
  This kind of coercive, threatening rhetoric is really not surprising at all. This is how tech companies operate. What stands out to me is the naive lack of operational security on the part of academics, who should know better than to touch this SaaS crap with a ten foot pole.
  - swozey 8d ago
    I'm imagining all of the potential targeted customer lists now. Grab all those sweet .edu, et al logs without anyone thinking the wiser- until you release a stolen solution. What've they got on .gov?
    - 27183 7d ago
      It's the kind of thing that should make people think, but I wonder to what extent anyone does anymore when it comes to this kind of risk of a vendor stealing from you.
mentalgear 8d ago
A wake up call for anyone using (openAI) chatbots : your data, ideas and execution can become their spontaneous 'inspirations' at any time - even if the LLM providers are 'just' using a meta concept monitoring system across all incoming user-data, running in the background constantly checking for 'lift-ables' for their company's bottom line.
JumpCrisscross 8d ago
> These two bullet points are extremely suspicious if you were honest I don’t think we can consider these accusations separately from the evidence being unveiled about OpenAI’s culture by Apple’s lawsuit. These guys seem to openly embrace the strongest interpretations of “good artists copy, great artists steal.”
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NewEntryHN 8d ago
This is hard to argue without a fine understanding of how much insight OpenAI had about the stab at the problem from the "public rumor" alone. If there was any sort of coarse insight that "they're trying to solve it this way", then both those things can be true: - The massive amount of compute from OpenAI re-discovering Buckmaster's work solely from the coarse insight (and solving the rest as well). - OpenAI still acknowledging they basically scooped the coarse insight using compute, and they're willing to credit Buckmaster. Buckmaster says "Concretely, what Levent and I did was to take the Cordoba and Martinez-Zoroa program, which achieved blowup results with rough forcing, and, with a great deal of help from LLMs, push it to smooth forcing and to the incompressible Euler equations". Could that simply be the prompt they used at OpenAI? How "stolen" would the proof be in that case?

colinhb 9d 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 9d 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.
- magicalist 8d ago
  > If this is true he should release the actual emails these were statements while on a call, and at least the career comment Bubeck has admitted to while doing damage control ("I deeply apologize for this extremely poor choice of words, it is the opposite of what I was trying to convey. (I should say that I retracted them on the spot by the way.)"[1]). [1] https://xcancel.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310 https://xcancel.com/SebastienBubeck/status/20973794116915163...
  - dgellow 8d ago
    What a horrible response from Bubeck. How did he think that would make him and OpenAI look good to tweet that?
    - ignoramous 8d ago
      If we're allowed to arm-chair judge harshly: It isn't uncommon for those (anybody) on the cusp of "greatness" to be delusional when challenged: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-to-know-about-main-character-syndrome https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-to-know-about-main-c...
      - fn-mote 8d ago
        Who here is on the cusp of greatness?? Or thinks they are? I really don’t understand which party you are referring to.
        CamperBob2 7d ago
        Anyone who comes close to solving a Millennium problem can honestly say they are on the cusp of greatness. Not sure what this question proves either way.
    - adastra22 8d ago
      Did we read the same tweet? It felt very forthright and level-headed to me. Not at all what I expected.
johnnienaked 8d ago
Sounds like a great time for open mathematical research is upon us. /s

viccis 9d ago

>After hearing of the rumor, OpenAI started researching Navier Stokes with a new internal model. This is the most suspicious thing to me. If their chat data were available to the corpus to be trained on (I thought they claimed not to do this?) then it really might be as simple as querying the model with "describe recent work from Tristan Buckmaster" and it will spit out this problem and his approach. No need to directly read his user data. This is basically just scooping, real scumbag behavior.

rakejake 9d ago
OAI doesn't need to mention Buckmaster's name directly in a prompt. They just need to select a basket of sessions that is guaranteed to contain Buckmaster's and then direct the LLM to attack only a specific method/angle. This is trivial to do while maintaining plausible deniability about not using his work.
- spongebobstoes 8d ago
  what reason do we have to believe that they did this? both things were proved by AI, isn't it logical that they could have very similar approaches? it is common that multiple people essentially simultaneously prove/invent the same thing I see zero evidence of wrongdoing
  - j16sdiz 8d ago
    This depends on what "proved by AI" meant. Was that a one shot prompt? or something guided by human, step by step? If that's the later, it won't use the same approach when not guided by the same human.
    - efavdb 8d ago
      Apparently Tristan was working on this problem for years, with AI providing help. Vs OpenAI spending a week with their new model, potentially having access to Tristan’s work.
  - 8d ago

hkmaxpro 8d ago

Both Sam Altman and Sebastien Bubeck admitted they only want Buckmaster to be the lead author on a rewrite of the OpenAI proof. https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140 https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310 A wake up call for using OpenAI models. If you discover something with their model and you work for a competitor, they “felt it would be inappropriate” for you “to author OpenAI’s work”.

derangedHorse 8d ago
It sounds like OpenAI is trying to appease the author when they don’t have to by allowing him to rewrite their proof. They probably don’t believe he deserves to, so him asking for a coauthor from Anthropic might overextend their grace in their eyes.
- nezi 8d ago
  Given that Tristan has said that the proofs that LLMs come up with are mostly "slop" and not up to the standard that human written papers achieve, maybe OpenAI needs an expert like him more than you think to get the result published?
  - fn-mote 8d ago
    Almost certainly the Lean proof needs to be decoded for humans and probably also made “human intelligible”. Now maybe LLMs can also simplify arguments and make sense of them for humans, but we haven’t seen that yet (unaided). (I haven’t looked at it, personally.)
  - nl 8d ago
    It's a Navier Stokes solution. They don't need any help publishing.
- reverius42 8d ago
  He's not "asking for a coauthor from Anthropic"; he already has a coauthor, who he's already been collaborating with, who happens to also be employed by Anthropic (but whose research in this area is not done as part of their employment at Anthropic).

dgellow 8d ago

If that part of the PDF is true that’s so disgusting, psychopathic behaviour > 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.” Some time later Levent received a text proposing that he and Sebastien speak one on one, saying, “I don’t know if Tristan is being fully rational right now.”

AnimalMuppet 8d ago
With "rational" being defined as "not making us look bad" at best, and "letting us take credit for their work" at worst. Yes, that is disgusting.
27183 8d ago
This kind of coercive, threatening rhetoric is really not surprising at all. This is how tech companies operate. What stands out to me is the naive lack of operational security on the part of academics, who should know better than to touch this SaaS crap with a ten foot pole.
- swozey 8d ago
  I'm imagining all of the potential targeted customer lists now. Grab all those sweet .edu, et al logs without anyone thinking the wiser- until you release a stolen solution. What've they got on .gov?
  - 27183 7d ago
    It's the kind of thing that should make people think, but I wonder to what extent anyone does anymore when it comes to this kind of risk of a vendor stealing from you.

mentalgear 8d ago

A wake up call for anyone using (openAI) chatbots : your data, ideas and execution can become their spontaneous 'inspirations' at any time - even if the LLM providers are 'just' using a meta concept monitoring system across all incoming user-data, running in the background constantly checking for 'lift-ables' for their company's bottom line.

JumpCrisscross 8d ago

> These two bullet points are extremely suspicious if you were honest I don’t think we can consider these accusations separately from the evidence being unveiled about OpenAI’s culture by Apple’s lawsuit. These guys seem to openly embrace the strongest interpretations of “good artists copy, great artists steal.”

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NewEntryHN 8d ago

This is hard to argue without a fine understanding of how much insight OpenAI had about the stab at the problem from the "public rumor" alone. If there was any sort of coarse insight that "they're trying to solve it this way", then both those things can be true: - The massive amount of compute from OpenAI re-discovering Buckmaster's work solely from the coarse insight (and solving the rest as well). - OpenAI still acknowledging they basically scooped the coarse insight using compute, and they're willing to credit Buckmaster. Buckmaster says "Concretely, what Levent and I did was to take the Cordoba and Martinez-Zoroa program, which achieved blowup results with rough forcing, and, with a great deal of help from LLMs, push it to smooth forcing and to the incompressible Euler equations". Could that simply be the prompt they used at OpenAI? How "stolen" would the proof be in that case?