Comment by raincole

https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/11723647135247030...

He very much is accusing them of stealing his work

The accusation is that they stole his approach of solving it. If OpenAI didn't bruteforce it with dozens of agents, he would have solved Navier-Stokes eventually since he evidently had the right approach. So knowing which approach to take makes all the difference, if they didn't know the approach they couldn't have solved it.

It's like he had a treasure map and was about to find the treasure, but they copied his treasure map and scooped him with a faster boat and found the treasure first. But he would have found it if it weren't for them.

> The said user (Tristan Buckmaster) didn't solve the millennium problem. He didn't really accuse that OpenAI stole his research either. The beef came from the fact OpenAI asked him to remove another mathematician, who works for Anthropic, from the credit.

Not quite accurate, Buckmaster was taking an approach that nobody else was, and this new proof uses this same approach just weeks after he saved those results to OpenAI workspaces. He asked OpenAI if they used chat logs for training the new model, and they did not confirm or deny.

Asking to remove his collaborator is also totally over the line though.

Edit: although this OpenAI post is not comforting: https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2097375276384567642

Quote: "While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models. "

Have you read the actual statement https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf ?

> I should say here why I interpreted their statement the way I did, the in- terpretation I will discuss below. The route to the Clay problem through a smooth force, options c and d in Fefferman’s statement of the problem, is the route Luis and Diego opened and the one Levent and I had quietly chosen to attack. Almost nobody else I know of was working on it. It is not the direction one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement. When I heard “forced,” it was a bright red flag.

...

> I asked when the first prompt had been sent by them. This question was not answered directly by OpenAI for some time. Eventually it was agreed that it had been sent in the past few days, after information about our work had reached OpenAI. > I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer.

It's not a direct accusation, but it's not far off.

You shouldn't accuse other people of spreading misinformation when you haven't read the actual sources in question, it's possible that they might know more than you.