Comment by contemporary343
21 hours ago
"I was shown a prompt and told the internal research model had simply been given the problem statement. Levent had been told by Sebastien “very little human input” had been used. This turned out not to be true. Over the course of the call, as members of their team sent Sebastien corrections and details over their internal chat, it emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem, that this was one of a number of things that was tried, that work had started on the unforced problem, that the team first set the model on easier problems, including Euler, that even the prompt that had been shown to me had been written by prompting Codex, and that an insane amount of compute had been used."
- This, from Tristan Buckmaster's writeup yesterday, indicates to me that there was more than incidental inspiration from Alpoge and Buckmaster.
All of those statements sound true, based on what I've heard.
- "very little human" input feels ambiguous, and if someone spends a few days prompting a model to solve a super hairy problem requiring a 100-page proof, I can understand reasonable people interpreting that as both "very little" and "not very little" human input
- it's all true that a team worked on this, a bunch of compute was burned, and the problem was solved in stages and pieces
I'm not sure how any of this provides evidence that OpenAI took any of their work.
As evidence against, we never looked at any of their ChatGPT conversations and our model's proof is quite different from theirs.
(I work at OpenAI, but not on the team that did this proof.)
I'm confused, your employer very directly stated that they are unable to confirm that the model was not trained on the conversations.
The models are trained on the conversations of hundreds of millions of people. ChatGPT has several billion conversations every day. I estimate that the model that solved Navier–Stokes was trained on data from nearly a trillion conversations.
It's unknowable and not possible to prove if any one specific conversation was the key to solving Navier–Stokes.
24 replies →
You don’t work on the team that did the proof yet you can with certainty make all of these claims?
It's unclear if you're suggesting that OpenAI did not train on their input or use their chats as inputs to training on a model that found the solution. Let's not provide an Elizabeth Holmes-esque interview where the question is dodged and words gain new meaning. The question can be answered with "Yes, we trained on their conversations" or "No, we did not train on their conversations".
I'm not coming from a place of distrust here. This should just be definitively answerable given the weight of the claims here. Surely between you, your lawyers, and other members of your team you can just clear this part up.
>> I'm not sure how any of this provides evidence that OpenAI took any of their work.
Sorry, but the burden of proof lies in the other direction: OpenAI needs to definitively prove that their agents did not look at the existing work that was about to be published. Otherwise OpenAI simply stole the glory and the spotlight (and I'm being charitable here).
That's entirely unreasonable. Allegations of malfeasance always need to be backed up by evidence.
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How does one prove a negative ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)#P...
> OpenAI needs to definitively prove that their agents did not look at the existing work that was about to be published.
I don’t think they’re too concerned about appeasing you, enraged_camel.
For most reasonable people, achievement in solving the other Millenium Prize problems at an unprecedented rate will be enough. At some point people will see models are capable of solving hard issues without whatever 0.00001% of the training data coming from irate individuals who believe their sample was the key component of the solution.