Comment by Yajirobe

18 hours ago

Why would Anthropic employee even use OpenAI's models? Cross-polination would have been avoided

> I should also emphasize that this is not an institutional effort. It is a strictly personal collaboration between the two of us, and there is no formal agreement behind it. I pay for the tools my group uses out of my own research funds, including footing a large bill to OpenAI.

The non-Anthropic employee, Tristan Buckmaster, is the one paying for OpenAI models and presumably the one who chose to use them. The Anthropic employee, Levent Alpöge, was collaborating in his personal capacity, and obviously it wouldn't make sense for him to cut off their work together just because his employer's competitor's tool was used.

They should have used a zero data retention agreement, user error

  • I suspect this controversy will blow the case for ZDR wide open. Whatever the facts (possibly unknowable), it's going to become a very public lesson that data sovereignty was never about "having nothing to hide".

    If this is what they do to academic pure mathematicians, where the stakes are so low (financially)—just imagine the sort of front-running that could be happening in other places.