Comment by qnleigh
6 hours ago
> It was also said that if OpenAI posted after us, they would say that we deserved the Clay Prize, and that we were the “closest humans to the problem”. I declined both offers. 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.”
I'm not even sure what to say to this, but I think this should be widely known if it is indeed what happened.
IF ANYTHING, OpenAI ought to investigate and officially react to this particular communique since this dude was communicating on their behalf. If there are supporting evidence, I would expect nothing less than a firing and an apology. The issue itself is separate from the whole thing.
Or, given how dedicated he appears to be to the company, a promotion and a raise.
Dark take, but I really hope not. If anything it would be a good opportunity to buy some goodwill by washing themselves from all the alleged shadiness so far.
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I think this should be in the title of the post. 'OpenAI allegedly threatening to ruin a prominent researcher's career', or smth like that.
There's some glaring mistakes in your framing.
First, this is an unnamed OpenAI employee speaking, not OpenAI the organization.
Second, you miscomprehended the article. The employee did not "threaten to ruin a prominent researcher's career". The actual quote is "Why would you ruin your career?", which implies the researcher would damage their own career, i.e. via self-sabotage.
Then the actual "threat" is "If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice” which is an entirely different statement.
> Second, you miscomprehended the article. The employee did not "threaten to ruin a prominent researcher's career"…
Proceeds to ask removal of another coauthor or else we totally discredit you - phrased as why would you do this to yourself.
This is how deniable threats work. The promise of "not being nice" in conjunction with "ruining the career" is as clear a threat as there can be in writing.
I don't even understand the conflict tbh. Probably I'm just dense. Tristan is not claiming NS, just a huge advance which may solve NS soon. OAI is claiming NS and willing to credit Tristan for the ideas and publish after.
Oai offers two options, the second Tristan views as dishonest. But Tristan rejects the first, why? Because he thinks it's theft? But then why would OAI threaten him?
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Dude you’re over this entire thread unflinchingly supporting OpenAI with nonsense semantics-based arguments.
Either put up some evidence-backed arguments, or shut up.
For context and balance, Bubeck has tweeted a curiously non-specific denial:
> A series of false and inflammatory allegations against me are currently circulating on social channels. To clarify, I came into the discussion following academic norms, and I'm disappointed that it has come to this. Anyone who knows me knows that academic standards are of the highest importance to me. Will have more to say tomorrow.
Attack is the best form of defence
My best guess is that from the perspective of the OpenAI people, Buckmaster was letting his paranoia about OpenAI training tank his opportunity to receive the Clay Prize (it seems like Buckmaster and Alpoge's result isn't quite the full result required for the Clay Prize, whereas apparently OpenAI does have that full result worked out, using the same approach that Buckmaster and Alpoge had been exploring).
Whether the Codex sessions could have indeed made their way into Astra training data is something I can only speculate on though.
"using the same approach that Buckmaster and Alpoge had been exploring" is imo mealy wording: it seems fairly likely that OA heard Buckmaster and Alpoge were close to a breakthrough, and decided to use their unlimited compute to quickly prompt based on their assumptions about B&As work.
Buckmaster is already an established world expert at these sorts of problems. Declining the Clay prize would hardly dent his career.
Zero data retention, wink.
No looksies, wink.
No trainsies, wink.
Well, Buckmaster says both his and Alpöge's use of Codex was non-institutional, and OpenAI claims the right to train their models on inputs and outputs of non-enterprise users in their service policies [0]. So I'm not sure they were even promised that.
[0] https://openai.com/policies/how-your-data-is-used-to-improve...
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simonw’s silence on this is telling.
That dude shows up in every thread that even implies genai uses user input for “market validation” to defend the poor defenseless genai corpos. (see figma/claude)
Must be circling the wagons to get their stories straight.
You understand that people sleep, right?
> I'm not even sure what to say to this, but I think this should be widely known if it is indeed what happened.
Call this behavior what it is, technofascism. Another comment compared it to the Godfather. To think this is the 21st century and academics are still horrible human beings.
Are you pretending OpenAI employees are "academics"?
Or are you stating that the researcher is a "horrible human being" for refusing to allow AI?
To come away from this thinking that the academic is the bad actor, given OpenAI’s reputation, is certainly an exercise in creative thinking.