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It is very unlikely to be plagiarized, and claims of plagiarism are largely unfounded and show a lack of understanding of the situation. They fall apart when re
by tristanj 6d ago
It is very unlikely to be plagiarized, and claims of plagiarism are largely unfounded and show a lack of understanding of the situation. They fall apart when reviewing the timeline, and what was actually solved.
This is the timeline:
On June 29, Buckmaster opted out of model training, and stopped allowing his chats to be used as training data with OpenAI https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117233413705701198 https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/11723341370570119...
On August 15, Buckmaster and Alpöge found their blow-up for 3D incompressible Euler with forcing https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf
In late August, OpenAI completed a pretrain of its latest internal model. A model derived from this pretrain, built after August 28, found a solution to 3D incompressible Euler without forcing and Navier-Stokes with forcing. https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/ https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/
To explain who solved what (I copied from here: https://x.com/IlinVasily29521/status/2097554700321329393 https://x.com/IlinVasily29521/status/2097554700321329393 )
Tristan + Levent: 3D incompressible Euler with forcing
OpenAI: 3D incompressible Euler without forcing
OpenAI: Navier-Stokes with forcing
No one: Navier-Stokes without forcing
Euler equations = Navier-Stokes without viscosity. Forcing means external force. Absence of viscosity and presence of external force make blowup easier to construct.
Tristan+Levent ticked the weakest case, OpenAI ticked the two next weakest, then the final case is unsolved. Only the last two are eligible for the Millennium Prize. The Navier-Stokes general case remains unsolved.
Buckmaster disabled model training long before the August 15 breakthrough results, so these chats were not used as training data for OpenAI's model which solved Navier-Stokes.
Additionally, Tristan and Levent only solved the easiest version of the problem and did not have the key insights to solve the harder versions of the problem required for the Millennium Prize.
And OpenAI directly addressed these plagiarism claims, and called them impossible: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/science/tristan-buckmaster-openai-math-navier-stokes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/science/tristan-buckmaste...
"We can say categorically that it is impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training."
- ggoo 6d agoI’m unsure or not if this is true but I did see some people saying that that checkbox when off only anonymizes your data, but it still may be trained on. Someone correct me if I am wrong
- polynomial 6d agoEven if it does use your data with or without anonymization, it doesn't have to be intentional, it could just be a glitch, or a bug, or something we'll catch in the next update, it's all good man, just a normal computer error.
- magicalist 6d ago> And OpenAI directly addressed these plagiarism claims, and called them impossible Funny, you were telling me two days ago that on the contrary, "it’s genuinely impossible to know how much of Buckmaster’s Codex data is in OpenAI’s training set": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49621648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49621648
- tristanj 6d agoWhich is still a true statement, and you're being deceptive in your framing here. You're conflating two completely different things. First, that OpenAI statement is in response to Buckmaster's plagiarism accusations regarding his August 15 breakthrough proof. Those accusations are unfounded because Buckmaster disabled data sharing on June 29. The model could not have seen or trained on his proof. Additionally, the model that found a solution to NS completed pre-training around August 25, and models take several months to train. The model very likely began its training prior to June, and would not be trained on any data from after that point. Second, it's still genuinely impossible to know how much of Buckmaster's pre-June 29 data persists in OpenAI's systems. That includes all chats (which are anonymized then trained on), any (thumbs up/thumbs down) chat ratings used as RLHF feedback (which are anonymized), any synthetic data derived from said anonymized chats and RLHF feedback, and any downstream models derived from said synthetic data. In short, Buckmaster's data has been anonymized, chopped into pieces, used to generate synthetic training data, then future models were trained on said synthetic data. There is no traceable chain of what happened to it. Buckmaster’s Codex data from prior to June 29 has been mixed and completely laundered, in a similar manner to a crypto mixer. Even an OpenAI employee calls it impossible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49614154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49614154
- pu_pe 5d agoFirst of all, who can say for certain whether OpenAI does what they say they do? For all we know, they cracked open this specific researcher's prompts and started from there. Second, the issue of anonymization is a red herring. There is a very limited number of people working in this approach, and most of them are likely making no progress. So Buckmaster's prompts might have had an outsized effect on the outcome. It's similar to that guy who created a site claiming he is a world-renowmed hot dog eating contestant, which ended up digested by OpenAI models as truth [1]. [1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt-and-googles-ai-and-it-only-took-20-minutes https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...
- fwip 6d agoIt doesn't seem like you're familiar with how mathematical research is done. Taking 6 weeks between a major breakthrough on a huge proof, and making your proof public, is not unusual. It takes a lot of time to finish a proof and figure out the best way to present it. I would personally be surprised if Buckmaster had not gotten it mostly cracked before June 29th.
- tristanj 6d agoThe timeline here does not support your argument. Quoting from Buckmaster's statement: For most of the past year progress was slow. We worked through the literature and upgraded various preliminary results, up to obtaining finite time blow up for the Incompressible Porous Media equation (with smooth forcing). This was until about a month ago, when we had real progress: on August 15th, we obtained the blow up results, with smooth forcing, for both Boussinesq and Euler. I can say the first LLM generated proof Levent sent me was the most horrendous I have ever read; we verified it on Lean on August 22nd. Since this point, we have been working around the clock to understand this proof and turn it into something readable. Specifically: "For most of the past year progress was slow ... until about a month ago, when we had real progress: on August 15th" And you avoided addressing the critical issue: they weren't even solving the same problem. Buckmaster solved a simplified and easier version of Navier-Stokes. OpenAI solved a harder version eligible for the Millennium prize. Buckmaster did not.
- machomaster 5d ago> I can say the first LLM generated proof Levent sent me was the most horrendous I have ever read; we verified it on Lean on August 22nd. Since this point, we have been working around the clock to understand this proof and turn it into something readable. People are acting as if OpenAI's cold machines snatched the result from the warm hands of human researchers. That's why people are so involved, they see it as humans vs. machines. But in reality, those humans in question rely heavily on AI and would not be able to do what they did without AI. So the situation can be seen as "humans are trying to minimize the impact AI/incl. OpenAI had on getting a solution". The situation is not "humans vs. machines", but "machines with a tiny bit of human involvement vs. machines with an even smaller amount of human involvement". However much the researcher's chat history may have influenced AI, this pales in comparisson to how much AI has influenced researchers. They are not even closely in the same universe. The conversation about the level of plagiarism is silly.