Comment by aenis
1 day ago
There is nothing even close to a proof. A lot of accusations, a lot of people ready with pitchforks and torches (sadly, also here on HN), but not a lot of facts.
Did the researches opt out from data sharing on subsidised subs?
Did anyone prove that their methods enabled OpenAI models to produce the solution?
For a discussion about science, there is almost no scientifical method applied to proving anyone stole anything.
On one side, yes we don't have hard evidence that intentional plagiarism is exactly what happened.
On the other side, the lack of evidence is pretty damning. Only OpenAI can try to prove that they came by these results legitimately, and the case they're making is quite weak. They could make public metadata about what their model was trained on and whether it did train on the conversations in question; they have not. TBQH I read it as even they don't know.
And regardless of whether the result is legitimately obtained by their model, they've not at all conducted themselves well throughout this story. They set out to scoop researchers based on a rumor. They threatened to ruin a mathematicians career. They put up a paper that deliberately doesn't cite the most relevant research, despite building directly on it. No matter how you look at it, OpenAI has and should lose any standing they had in the research community.
That it was a dick move, I think there is no doubt about that. OpenAI wanted to scoop Anthropic, and the two guys working on the problem got caught in the crossfire.
Both OpenAI and the researchers know if the sessions in questions were subject to data sharing. Why neither the scientists nor OpenAI is clear about that is weird - it would seem at least one party has the incentive to report that. But even if their sessions were in training data sets its hard to tell whether it influenced the outcome. Those models are big, but are they big enough to preserve subtle, niche techniques enough to draw from them while solving a related problem? Probably nobody knows.
Actually no, the lack of evidence can be readily fixed by the researchers simply disclosing the pertinent parts of their notes and/or chats. The discovery has been scooped, so I don't see any value in keeping them private anymore. Then everybody can see how related the models' and the researchers' works are.