Comment by tristanj
13 hours ago
The flaw with this line of reasoning is that Buckmaster and Alpöge only had a partially completed proof of a weaker version of the Navier-Stokes problem. OpenAI's internal model solved the full, harder problem. This means the key information needed to bridge the gap was not present in Buckmaster and Alpöge's chat history.
You might retort that ChatGPT used the training data to copy their approach, but the approach Buckmaster and Alpöge chose was already published by Luis and Diego in 2023 and in every frontier model's training set.
This argument proves too much. By this standard, it wouldn't have counted as copying their approach if the researchers had just fed in Levent & Buckmaster's paper verbatim as a prompt into the swarm.
I don't think the person describing the paper by Buckmaster as the same as the 2023 paper by Córdoba and Martínez-Zoroa is really discussing this in good faith fwiw. There are some massive advancements within it and if the person was participating wasn't just regurgitating something to "win the argument" in their eyes, they wouldn't describe it that way.
I don't believe people are denying that the model is impressive. The problem is that learning someone else is making progress on a topic using method X and then rushing to scoop them borders on academic misconduct. If, on top of this, their private conversations about X were used in the proof, I really don't see how its defensible...
The rumor going around X was that Anthropic had solved a Millennium Prize problem weeks ago and was sitting on the solution, waiting to release it right before their IPO to maximize hype.
If I were at OpenAI, I'd naturally want to snipe that from them. I am completely unsurprised they formed a crack team to steal Anthropic's glory, and do so in just five days.
Between companies, direct malevolent competition is OK. Between academics, there are other rules to the game. When you go into a boxing match, you agree to get punched in the face.
All this to say, trust is important, and grounded in social convention. So I do agree with you, but also disagree.
Whenever this is OK or not really depends on how the breakthrough is contextualized, and how there people at play, here, agree to contextualize it.
In my view, in the blog post, there is much discussion about who will be publishing the paper. If instead it was just a blog post that said "oops, we beat you to it, our model is the best", it would have been different.
I’m pretty sure you think you are doing a good job of defending your employer and you probably believe “Open”AI are the good guys here. I also acknowledge that they butter your bread so your financial future currently depends on their success.
However the way you are conducting yourself in public, while announcing yourself as an OpenAI employee is doing enormous harm to the greater and magnanimous aim of your organisation. Take a step back and read the temperature of the room. Being the smartest guy in the room will never protect you from alienating the rest of the room into a baying mob. Right now you are Icarus flying straight into the sun.
I'm not an OAI employee and never pretended to be one are you high?
You’re confusing usernames, which is pretty ironic given your nasty comment.