Comment by colinhb
21 hours ago
The allegations of contamination (using Tristan and Levent's work) aren't very well evidenced, but this behavior by OpenAI (from the authors' statement) makes them seem like the bad guys:
> 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.”
Threatening a research mathematician and dangling and $1M payday to dissociate from his research collaborators and to adopt OpenAI's narrative is bad stuff.
Both Sam Altman and Sebastien Bubeck admitted they only want Buckmaster to be the lead author on a rewrite of the OpenAI proof.
https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140
https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310
A wake up call for using OpenAI models. If you discover something with their model and you work for a competitor, they “felt it would be inappropriate” for you “to author OpenAI’s work”.
If I was a company with a zero data retention contract involving OAI I would be asking for a third party audit of such claim of zero retention like, yesterday.
Could they say they don't retain, but do something "transformative" like use their own AI to summarize and paraphrase user sessions?
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Is there an implication of violation of ZDR here? Not a challenge. Just a request for clarification.
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It can still be academic plagiarism even if they ticked the box to allow training on their prompts.
The idea OpenAI or Anthropic won't train on your data—even with an enterprise contract—is a fantasy at best, and dilusion at worst.
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> We did not rush to publish even though the other team wasn't communicating with us.
Pretty clear this was rushed: there are no comments from external mathematicians, unlike the Erdős announcement:
https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-c...
Their own claim is that they wanted Buckmaster without Alpöge to lead a rewrite of OpenAI's Navier-Stokes work, not of Alpöge-Buckmaster's Euler work.
No one can know if that's correct without proof but I don't know how you're reading it so differently.
They want Buckmaster to dissociate with Alpöge in a follow-up rewrite of OpenAI's work. (They only publicly admit “Buckmaster as the lead author”, but judging from Buckmaster’s statement, it’s pretty clear that don’t want Alpöge at all.)
Just suggesting to a mathematician to dissociate with their collaborator for a follow-up work, because their collaborator “is inappropriate to author OpenAI’s work”, is completely against the norm of mathematical research. As charm137 puts it in a comment below:
> This is like a researcher from CMU saying to an NYU researcher that their collaborator, being from MIT, is a problem - this is as ridiculous as that!
They are missing a great marketing stunt: "Our models are so good that our competitors are using it for leading research".
Kinda weird because the pure math world doesn't have this concept of "lead authors" like other STEM areas do. Authors are alphabetically listed and there isn't generally this kind of hierarchy.
From what I understand they aren't comfortable with the Anthropic employee being an author at all, not just lead author.
It works in niche fields where everyone knows each other and every discussion involves who did what portion of the work for a result.
It's astounding that the thought to dissociate one of the mathematicians from the proposed publication was driven by their corporate institutional affiliation - and that that exclusion was suggested by a scientist themselves! This is like a researcher from CMU saying to an NYU researcher that their collaborator, being from MIT, is a problem - this is as ridiculous as that!
Progress in humanity's knowledge now has to play second fiddle to narrow corporate interests as IPO timings near (both of which wouldn't exist anyway if generations of mathematicians hadn't paved the way for AIs to become as good as they have).
The scientist allegedly making that request comes from a machine learning background. Perhaps he's not familiar with the culture in mathematics regarding authorship. That sort of squabbling over author priority would be unconscionable to mathematicians.
Bubeck is familiar with how publishing works in mathematics.
No, it's common to list authors alphabetically in a lot of computer science journals too.
(To help people keep track: that's OpenAI (allegedly) threatening Tristan Buckmaster (NYU) to remove Levent Alpöge as a co-author. Alpöge is a well-known[0] Anthropic mathematician).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49412947 the Hopf conjecture)
Playing the devil's advocate here but it's true that OpenAI didn't have to make those offers.
They kind of did though, they were hoping to keep the fact that they may well have plagiarised these researchers unpublished work quiet. They did not want this to turn into a scandal about the fact that they appear to be training on prompts without consent
It makes a certain amount of sense. The internet data is too polluted with AI usage now to be useful, so the only AI free new data source is the prompts people feed into ChatGPT. The only problem is that its clearly plagiarism
Edit:
OpenAI have admitted to training on prompts at the time the breakthrough was made:
https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/11723647135247030...
OpenAI claims the data contamination issue only surfaced after they proactively reached out to Buckmaster and Alpöge to coordinate a joint release. They also say that even if there was some contamination, the underlying proofs diverge substantially:
> Our effort began on September 1st after hearing a rumor which we later realized was related to Levent Alpöge, an Anthropic employee, and Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at NYU. After the completion of our full project and Lean verification (on September 6th), believing from the rumor they also had a solution of Navier–Stokes, we reached out to them to offer a concurrent release of our result and to recognize their priority in a joint announcement. At that point we found out that they had a resolution of the forced Euler problem. In these discussions we offered them visibility into all of the prompts we used and later to see the proof. We recognize the priority of their work on forced Euler and congratulate them on their remarkable mathematical achievement.
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> the only AI free new data source is the prompts
hmmmmmmmmmm
Their own tweets are also pretty eyebrow-raising:
> One option we discussed was that Tristan could be the lead author on a rewrite of OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes proof. It is in that context that I said “it would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee” because I felt it would be inappropriate for an Anthropic employee to author OpenAI’s work.
Why would you offer another researcher the lead authorship on your groundbreaking paper if you thought you had developed it independently?
And why cannot they have someone associated with Anthropic as co-author? That’s not obvious at all. For sure they would prefer to be the only ones, but it’s pretty standard to have co-authors from different companies, even if they are technically competitors. What is inappropriate about it?
because it severely dilutes the PR value.
If writing up the paper would involve using OpenAI's unreleased model, neither OpenAI nor Anthropic would be happy about Alpöge having that access.
would edit my comment but it's been a few hours
> but it’s pretty standard to have co-authors from different companies
that's only true for papers that are not millenium problem solutions
in another world this could have been a beautiful collaboration
It's inappropriate if you're a sociopath.
IIRC that happened with evolution. In the initial presentation of Darwin and Wallace's work on evolution (presented with their consent by someone else) Wallace was described as the primary author since he was planning to publish first.
Of course, no one understood that presentation so it was Darwin's later book that everyone remembers
Holy late capitalism. Everything revolves around line-go-up, and sociopaths rule the show. These people cannot even collaborate like civilised scientists on one of the most famous open problems in mathematics?
“It would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee” I cannot believe this shit.
Soon Levent will just be turned into soylent and he will have never been an Anthropic employee. We still need some progress here though.
I´m waiting on the other side version, because I know there is no justifiable way to talk to a person like they did.
Sociopathic behaviour.
OpenAI version of events conceed some of the words alleged to have been used may have been used https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310
> "When we learned that they had Euler but not Navier-Stokes, we offered to let them go first, to suggest that they should be the ones to get the prize, and optionally for Tristan to be the lead author on a rewrite of the OpenAI proof. We felt it was challenging to offer the same to Levent (an Anthropic employee), who was not willing to talk or coordinate with us anyway. We were open to other solutions."
What an admission! "We tried to defraud Alpöge out of sharing the Millenium Prize (that we don't dispute he might actually deserve), for no other reason than he works for our competitor and that inconveniences us".
I thought Tristan Buckmaster's allegations sounded fantastic; and then 'sama just came out (tweet's ~30 minutes old) and admitted to all of them. Wow!
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Interesting that they quote the mathematician directly: “there is nothing you can do, I simply do not trust you”
but then they proceed to NOT quote themselves themselves verbatim: "I deeply apologize for this extremely poor choice of words, it is the opposite of what I was trying to convey."
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May be unfairly jaded or just well calibrated given the body of evidence, but I can't help but think of another quote about OpenAI leadership:
> Not consistently candid
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In what world a tweet and a screenshot of a private convo are evidence of good faith? Plain sociopathic behavior.
Talking like that and threatening an academic like that is crazy. I read the explanations Altman and the others posted and they completely skip over the whole "I don't have to be nice" style threats.
As soon as I thought "man, this sounds like some evil sociopath shit," my second thought was "oh, Sam Altman must have been personally involved."
I can sort of picture Sam Altman screaming "I drink your milkshake" at some poor researcher who foolishly used chatgpt/codex to aid in their work now.