Comment by tristanj
3 hours ago
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.
Claiming OAI was going to "totally discredit" Buckmaster is baseless.
From the article, it seems OAI wanted to continue discussing the situation with Buckmaster and reach a resolution, but Buckmaster did not want to, declined to respond, and published first.
Also keep in mind we've only heard one side of the story, so any interpretation of events so far is incomplete. There should be a lot more information from OAI's side coming out later today.
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.
The employee was named as “Sebastien Bubeck.” It helps to read the article.
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?
He claims to have found a counterexample for NS (see the second paragraph of the article), but the paper is not ready yet.
OpenAI claims to already have a full proof (which they produced in the past 5 days after the rumors leaked). Hence the dispute.
What I find interesting is the timeline of when he found counterexample for NS is very unclear. Did Tristan find a counterexample weeks ago or was it very recently? Was it after OpenAI solved it? The wording is intentionally vague.
Either way, there was a massive rush to publish these results.
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.