Comment by magicalist

18 hours ago

> Buried under the drama is the fact that OpenAI is claiming that an internal model they’ve been training for less than two weeks is more than twice as capable in mathematics as Astra.

Is this buried under the drama or are the major OpenAI twitter accounts from the people involved in the drama desperately attempting to make this the story after everything else obviously got away from them?

I don't know what anyone's been saying on Twitter and I don't care. If it's really true that there's a model out there that's that capable two weeks after the start of training, then that's objectively a much bigger deal than a priority dispute, even if the latter involves juicy allegations of espionage and skulduggery.

  • It isn't a priority dispute, the more concerning allegation is that OpenAI may be training their models on prompts that mathematicians were using to solve this problem, and then surprise surprise OpenAI were able to replicate that work in their latest model

    What we're really looking at is seemingly a massive plagiarism scandal, which especially brings a lot of the past results into question

    If OpenAI is training models on researchers' prompts, and then threatening them into staying quiet about it, who knows if anything that's been announced is genuine - or just theft?

    Edit:

    OpenAI have admitted they were training on prompts at the time they made their breakthrough

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

    • If you're alleging that they don't actually have a highly capable model and the work they're attributing to it was actually plagiarized from human mathematicians, well, that would be big if true, but I'd be inclined to take the other side of that bet. With most previous splashy AI results, others have subsequently used the model to do other things around the same difficulty level. Also, it would still be necessary to explain why all these famous open problems are suddenly falling like dominoes, if it's not AI solving them.

      If you're saying that the question of whether they actually have a highly capable model is less important than the question of whether there's a plagiarism scandal, I continue to disagree.

      11 replies →

    • I think all he big labs are pretty explicit about when they do and don't train on customer prompts. Is the accusation here that OpenAI trained on prompts when they claimed not to? Or were the mathematicians using one of the interfaces that allows OpenAI to train on the customer data?

    • All that I have seen OpenAI employees "admit" is that if you press the Thumbs up button on a response, this can be used as a signal for training.

      That's it. The rest appears to be wild speculation.

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    • even apart from the plagiarism issue, what sort of slimy company thinks "oh, here's someone using our models to work on a problem, let's throw more compute at it and scoop them"?

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    • >It isn't a priority dispute, the more concerning allegation is that OpenAI may be training their models on prompts that mathematicians were using to solve this problem,

      I don't want to get epistemiological, but these aren't allegations, and your use of "may be" is more of lack of knowledge on how OpenAI and ChatGPT work. Read the Terms of Service, this is not a secret, OAI doesn't deny it, usage of ChatGPT through the web interface or through its App, including Codex, are shared with OAI and used to train future models. This is one of the ways in which ChatGPT works and improves, it's not something we are learning now, it's something that was always known, welcome to the subject.

    • >It isn't a priority dispute, the more concerning allegation is that OpenAI may be training their models on prompts that mathematicians were using to solve this problem,

      I don't want to get epistemiological, but these aren't allegations, and your use of "may be" is more of lack of knowledge on how OpenAI and ChatGPT work. Read the Terms of Service, this is not a secret, OAI doesn't deny it, usage of ChatGPT through the web interface or through its App, including Codex, are shared with OAI and used to train future models. This is one of the ways in which ChatGPT works and improves, welcome to the subject.