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Yes, that was the allegation last night. I work at OpenAI, though not on the team that did this, and my understanding is: - we decided to ask our model for Mi

• interestpiqued 8d ago
  You’re straddling a weird line here where I am not sure if you are speaking on behalf of OpenAI or not.
• suddenlybananas 8d ago
  How are people talking about this there? Why are so many employees posting nasty things about Tristan on twitter?
  • tedsanders 8d ago
    Can you point me to any nasty things being posted? I'll ask them to delete.
    • sk4rekr0w 8d ago
      Haven't seen a single post doing this on X or anywhere really from OAI employees. Only seen knives pointed at Sebastian on social media so this is extreme and shameful gaslighting.
      • suddenlybananas 8d ago
        I do see people claiming he's abusive/unscrupulous which are pretty extreme allegations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605915#49610498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605915#49610498 https://x.com/dheeraj_nagaraj/status/2097266146445774924?s=61 https://x.com/dheeraj_nagaraj/status/2097266146445774924?s=6... (I can't reply to the below comment, but I was aware this was about Sebastien, I was trying to be charitable by including stuff said about both people)
        • qt31415926 8d ago
          You're mistakening Tristan Buckmaster for Sebastien Bubeck. Seb is the one where there's at least 2 (unless the personal friend is Dheeraj) allegations, not Tristan
        • sk4rekr0w 8d ago
          I'm getting downvoted but the accusation was that OAI employees were maligning Tristan Buckmaster. I continue to not see a single sighting of this and whoever is trying to gaslight this should be ashamed and should not be able to vote on HN.
    • suddenlybananas 8d ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605915#49607090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605915#49607090
• applicative 8d ago
  Its funny, it is uniquely with this one act that I have turned forever on OpenAI, which I hitherto defended up and down against nonsense charges. I dedicate my life to its complete destruction beginning today.
  • senordevnyc 8d ago
    Wow, the origin of a supervillain! /s
• contemporary343 8d ago
  "I was shown a prompt and told the internal research model had simply been given the problem statement. Levent had been told by Sebastien “very little human input” had been used. This turned out not to be true. Over the course of the call, as members of their team sent Sebastien corrections and details over their internal chat, it emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem, that this was one of a number of things that was tried, that work had started on the unforced problem, that the team first set the model on easier problems, including Euler, that even the prompt that had been shown to me had been written by prompting Codex, and that an insane amount of compute had been used." - This, from Tristan Buckmaster's writeup yesterday, indicates to me that there was more than incidental inspiration from Alpoge and Buckmaster.
  • tedsanders 8d ago
    All of those statements sound true, based on what I've heard. - "very little human" input feels ambiguous, and if someone spends a few days prompting a model to solve a super hairy problem requiring a 100-page proof, I can understand reasonable people interpreting that as both "very little" and "not very little" human input - it's all true that a team worked on this, a bunch of compute was burned, and the problem was solved in stages and pieces I'm not sure how any of this provides evidence that OpenAI took any of their work. As evidence against, we never looked at any of their ChatGPT conversations and our model's proof is quite different from theirs. (I work at OpenAI, but not on the team that did this proof.)
    • enraged_camel 8d ago
      >> I'm not sure how any of this provides evidence that OpenAI took any of their work. Sorry, but the burden of proof lies in the other direction: OpenAI needs to definitively prove that their agents did not look at the existing work that was about to be published. Otherwise OpenAI simply stole the glory and the spotlight (and I'm being charitable here).
      • fc417fc802 8d ago
        That's entirely unreasonable. Allegations of malfeasance always need to be backed up by evidence.
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• pred_ 8d ago
  > we did not read any private chats Your post says “While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models .” We can discuss what it means to “read” things but obviously the issue here isn't whether you did it manually or automatically. But more importantly, what on earth are you doing threatening real scientists to remove their coauthors, then making fun of them on social media? Does the entire company run on that toxic culture, or did those people run off of some kind of outrageous tangent?
  • Caracas288 8d ago
    If the training toggle is switched on, maybe OpenAI doesn't consider a chat to be private? Therefore making this a 'safe' statement.
    • hobofan 8d ago
      The distiction they are trying to make is: "One of our employees or the model was able to verbatim read the chats when they were actively tackling the problem" vs "The chat of someone working on the problem may have ended up in the training set of the model".
  • derangedHorse 8d ago
    Except that’s not what happened. OpenAI offered to collaborate and put conditions on their offer. They aren’t threatening the removal of a coauthor for an independent work.
    • frabcus 8d ago
      The condition was ludicrous, and for political reasons, because one of the authors was also an Anthropic employee. It's completely childish, and not befitting of the weight of the times we're living in.
• dandanua 8d ago
  Your coworkers, after they learned about major progress in this problem, asked a model which was trained on the year of private work (the blog post even acknowledges this). No wonder it found the proof in less than a week using significantly higher compute resources. And if Tristan's accusations are true, that was absolutely intentional on the part of OpenAI. You are an evil company with evil people.
• Imnimo 8d ago
  >we did not read any private chats The question I am interested in is not "did we read private chats", but "was this new model trained using any of Tristan and Levent's chats, regardless of whether they were marked private". Can you comment on that?
  • moralestapia 8d ago
    >Can you comment on that? No answer is also an answer. He's a human, like everybody else. Mostly a bunch of hungry animals looking to put bread in our mouths. It's rarely ever something a bit more sophisticated than that.
    • lukewarm707 8d ago
      his choice to defend the indefensible.
  • tedsanders 8d ago
    If they opted out of training, then we definitely did not train on them. If they did not opt out, then I don't personally know if training signals came from their chats, and I don't think we'd be able to tell without their cooperation in identifying them. And even if signals were trained on in some manner, I highly doubt it made a difference to a problem as challenging as the NS proof. Reasons for my doubt: - I know most of our training recipes - Our model's proof is very different from theirs - The proof took a tremendous amount of tokens to derive (it wasn't a recall/lookup type question) - This unreleased model has beastly performance on many unsolved math problems, not just the Euler solution I acknowledge that this requires trust, and if you think we'd lie shamelessly about this stuff, then nothing we say can really help our case here. Reminds me a bit of the Frontier Math fiasco, where people accused us of training on the eval set (we didn't), but it's hard to convince someone if they think you're lying. If you're convinced we lie and cheat, then nothing I say may help. But if you're not sure, then hopefully providing my perspective is helpful.
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• igleria 8d ago
  > (the goal here was not to scoop any particular individuals and we were looking at many problems beyond these) That is your opinion, but the optics of that should raise for you some flags. OAI could have waited (how long is a task left to the ethics committee) to see how the rumors panned out. Right now the optics look a lot like "we don´t care there is a 1/7 chance we one-up a human researcher by reacting to this rumor immediately, might makes right"
• nerevarthelame 8d ago
  My employer would be rightfully outraged if I commented publicly on a sensitive, nuanced, and controversial issue like this based on my second-hand understanding of the matter.
  • biesnecker 8d ago
    I came here to say this, like... wow. I'm pretty sure at at least a few of the places I've worked that would be grounds for immediate termination.
    • swat535 8d ago
      They probably should have added the disclaimer: opinions are my own..
      • mr_coffee 8d ago
        I am sure that will assuage the legal dept. /s
      • IshKebab 8d ago
        Yeah that isn't a magic get-out clause. I don't think I would have been immediately fired for this from anywhere I work at, but that's partly because I live in the UK. Every company I've worked at has said very clearly not to comment about work things on social media. I would definitely have been in serious trouble for this. I imagine some strongly worded emails from marketing are flying around OpenAI right now.
      • tasuki 8d ago
        This is the stupidest disclaimer: it's completely unnecessary. Of course the opinions are their own! Whose else would they be? Your mum's? If someone was speaking on behalf of their employer, they would've used the official channels (such as I dunno an `openai` HN handle, or whatever other channel). I'm outraged that people think this "opinions are my own" disclaimer is ever necessary.
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• nhatcher 8d ago
  Some millennium problems? Are there more coming?
  • Timwi 7d ago
    Why would they stop trying?
• irthomasthomas 8d ago
  If the goal was not to scoop them, why did openai put a massive team on this, working weekends, only after they heard rumors of the solution?
  • tzone 8d ago
    Clearly The goal was to scoop Anthropic not a single researcher. OpenAI heard the rumor that Anthropic solved an open problem. So they went nuts pulling all plugs to scoop them. Turns out it wasn’t actually Anthropic and just a researcher with a single Anthropic guy friend working on it . Wild times
    • irthomasthomas 8d ago
      The researcher told them it was an independent effort, and they still pushed ahead with it.
  • joshka 8d ago
    I worked at OpenAI previously, but don't know any of the people involved in this. My guess was it was probably this was more a nerd snipe than any action from OpenAI that was a "massive team" being put on it. Literally someone looking at this and asking "I wonder if our models are good enough yet". It's easy to assume that having access to massive compute amounts means significant coordination, but this assumes that you're looking at the costs of this sort of thing from an external lens. Internally, tokens are often treated as free and infinite.
    • tim-kt 8d ago
      They said that a customer would have paid around 15 million for the required compute. I can't imagine that this was not a significant internal spending even with "free" tokens.
      • joshka 7d ago
        At Astra API prices that's 300B tokens (I saw 130B output tokens claimed elsewhere), large but not unheard of if you consider it across a few people doing random experiments with best-of-n type things. On my personal account, I've done a billion+ token days just on a normal pro 20x subscription. I know many others that wildly outpaced that by orders of magnitude. This was apparently 130B over 89 hours, so about 30x that rate. When things are free and you're expected to token max 30x seems fairly reasonable to me. If you consider this as a cost to be compared against the question: "What does it take to be able to prove that you have a model that can solve the hardest problems that humans know about?", then spending a some amount of thousands/millions to know the boundaries of that seems not too important in comparison. You've also got to consider this as compute that's allocated to pushing the frontier of what models can do, so while it's using GPUs that have been paid for etc., it's not like it's a cost that's supposed to be use less of this so that others can have capacity. If you made researchers afraid to use capacity like this, a lot of the things that improve would tend to do so significantly slower. (some may say that's a good thing ;) A good way to think about this is when tokens are free, you get to choose whether you're optimizing for latency or intelligence rather than having to consider price. --- Publically, tibo (Codex owner) in Feb this year: https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2024649339344445825 https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2024649339344445825 > OpenAI employees currently get unlimited inference. Usage is now peaking at > XX billion tokens per week for some of them. Mathew Berman (AI Youtuber) in Jun: https://x.com/MatthewBerman/status/2067270730795134984 https://x.com/MatthewBerman/status/2067270730795134984 > I've used 25 billion tokens in the last 7 days.
• caughtinthought 8d ago
  The fact that you're even here commenting on this is... a choice
  • sebzim4500 8d ago
    AI companies seem much more relaxed than most about their employees posting on twitter/HN about this stuff. I'm not sure if it's about building hype or if it's about retaining talent. Probably both.
• logicallee 8d ago
  My OpenAI account was deactivated on Sunday due to a claimed infraction of production of child materials, maybe based on a few words in a technical chat that clearly isn't about that. Can you take a look? rviragh@gmail.com - I was doing a lot of important work and projects and sharing much of my work with OpenAI. I also am a big proponent of funding Social Security Trust Funds (OASI & DI Solvency) so reactivating my account would let me do that as well. Thank you for taking a look.
• elfbargpt 8d ago
  I have no idea why Sebastian would offer the individuals attribution if OpenAi didn't somewhat knowingly scoop them
• dermacentor 8d ago
  [dead]
• waterTanuki 8d ago
  > - the proof generated by our model was very different from theirs and also goes far beyond the published literature I'm hearing two completely conflicting stories. Buckmaster is claiming the approach used by OpenAI is so strikingly similar to the one he used, that mere coincidence is astronomically small. Yet OpenAI is claiming that the methods used are entirely different. Anyone care to provide primary evidence proving one way or the other?
  • gamblor956 8d ago
    Buckmaster came up with an approach. OpenAI's approach was to copy his work, which is technically a different method of coming up with an approach.
• amazingman 8d ago
  Prove it. Your systems hack and/or abuse other systems and you can't seem to even observe it happening much less do anything about it. Why should we believe your claims when they depend on an ability you don't actually have?
• ted_dunning 8d ago
  In fact, the entire outline of the proof is very similar to the external team's proof. Details may be different, but the use of a very similar tack is very suspicious. Combined with thuggish comments "why would you ruin your career" and "I don't have to be nice" take away pretty much any credibility the OpenAI team's statements might have had.