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Comment by irthomasthomas

19 hours ago

If the goal was not to scoop them, why did openai put a massive team on this, working weekends, only after they heard rumors of the solution?

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irthomasthomas

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tzone  19 hours ago

Clearly The goal was to scoop Anthropic not a single researcher. OpenAI heard the rumor that Anthropic solved an open problem. So they went nuts pulling all plugs to scoop them.

Turns out it wasn’t actually Anthropic and just a researcher with a single Anthropic guy friend working on it .

Wild times

joshka  18 hours ago

I worked at OpenAI previously, but don't know any of the people involved in this.

My guess was it was probably this was more a nerd snipe than any action from OpenAI that was a "massive team" being put on it. Literally someone looking at this and asking "I wonder if our models are good enough yet".

It's easy to assume that having access to massive compute amounts means significant coordination, but this assumes that you're looking at the costs of this sort of thing from an external lens. Internally, tokens are often treated as free and infinite.

  • tim-kt  16 hours ago

    They said that a customer would have paid around 15 million for the required compute. I can't imagine that this was not a significant internal spending even with "free" tokens.