Comment by lhd1
5 hours ago
I find the framing a little strange, a sort of David vs Goliath (with his enormous computational resources at his disposal). Since Levent is at Anthropic whose internal models are presumably as capable as anything OpenAI has. So why wasn't Anthropic behind their effort? Why did Tristan use OpenAI's models when it should have been known was a potential outcome? I understand they wanted a normal math collaboration but presumably what Levent brought was his resources (as far as I can see Navier-Stokes is not his speciality). Normally these things are hashed out formally beforehand to avoid the sort of thing now happening.
[delayed]
They were working on it for almost a year, and Buckmaster has evidently been interested in Navier-Stokes for a while. This seems to be more of an innocent collaboration between two researchers than a strong company PR effort. Maybe Anthropic should have stepped in and made a large team to help them finish the proof (and maybe they tried and didn't succeed, who knows).
If what he wrote is accurate, it does suggest that OAI is effectively extremely hostile to cutting edge researchers (eg, if we hear rumors about your partial success on a problem that has huge PR benefits, then we'll assemble a strike team of researchers with unlimited compute to claim the win for ourselves, possibly by training on your data). It's also not a good look for them to request author removals based on company affiliations.
I think what you have in mind is more appropriate for more normal corporate projects and the like. But academic collaborations are not usually so political/'profit' driven, if that makes sense.
> So why wasn't Anthropic behind their effort?
Presumably because this was something Levent did in his spare time and because it was not obvious that this work would eventually lead to a breakthrough.
> Why did Tristan use OpenAI's models when it should have been known was a potential outcome?
I'm sure in the past he had less cynical feelings about OpenAI and their penchant for academic fraud.
> I understand they wanted a normal math collaboration but presumably what Levent brought was his resources (as far as I can see Navier-Stokes is not his speciality)
I think you're not giving the guy enough credit in saying that his contribution came down to having an API key for Anthropic models.
> Normally these things are hashed out formally beforehand to avoid the sort of thing now happening.
How would that have helped? That agreement (which may well still exist) would not have involved OpenAI.