Comment by jjwiseman
17 hours ago
First, OpenAI is not claiming that the model wasn't trained on those sessions. What they've said is “We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem.” and “We did not use their prompts or proofs to prompt our models or direct our agents.” and “While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.”
They also said “Our effort began on September 1st after hearing a rumor which we later realized was related to Levent Alpöge … and Tristan Buckmaster….” They say the rumor was that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved, and that this prompted them to launch "an effort to evaluate it on all open Millennium Prize problems and a few other high-impact problems."
It's not obvious to me that's an unethical thing to do, if it happened as they described.
> It's not obvious to me that's an unethical thing to do
In terms of work in mathematics, something I personally would not do based on ethical grounds would be to hear a rumor that some researchers are taking a certain approach and may be nearing a solution, use a model that was possibly contaminated with intimate knowledge about that approach (though later they investigated and think it wasn't), and then commit millions to tens of millions of dollars and untold amounts of hardware to try to beat them to it. If I had done this, I also wouldn't have pestered the researchers on a Sunday night to meet immediately so we could negotiate a nice way of presenting the actions I had decided to take.
Even if you don't think it was unethical, it was never going to be received well in the community that was especially going to care about this work, and who are very much peers to many of the people working on this solution, so it was at the least an enormous (and well-deserved) own-goal that their unveiling of their solution to NS went like this.
But by OpenAI's telling they heard a rumor that the problem had already been solved. So they reached out to the other researchers as an attempt to share the credit, and in fact have at least one of them be the lead author (which is when they found out the AI had solved a broader problem than the researchers.) Seems pretty ethically palatable.
I suspect the main reason the community is not receiving it well is largely the same reason many developers are not receiving coding agents well.
Hold on, you've just ignored the point of the post you're responding to. What isn't being received well is hearing that others are close to publishing on a solution to a problem, so quickly using your power imbalance (millions of USD and access to way better models) to front run this. Even if their model wasn't trained on the conversations, this is just a dick thing to do.
That's it, that's why it isn't being received well.
Even if you judge OpenAI solely on their public communications it still sounds really bad.
That they heard a rumour that a major open problem had been solved, so they decided to try and scoop the other mathematicians while they were writing up their preprint is extremely unsporting.
Then they decided to exclude an author because of his employer, even though he had used their own products to write the proof!
They haven't necessarily breached any formal ethical rules but their behaviour will lead to them and their products being shut out from the mathematical community.
> I suspect the main reason the community is not receiving it well is largely the same reason many developers are not receiving coding agents well.
Because the training data is millions of hours human efforts being distilled into a cascading hierarchy of enrichment by interested parties without providing attribution or compensation?
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as a developer that had a brief career in academia, i don't think your last comment is right at all. 99.9% of what i work on as a webdev, even if it's challenging and unique at the margins, is not really novel. concerns about job security aside, i don't really think of an agent as stealing my ideas because it's good at writing CRUD APIs.
collaborating with ChatGPT on a novel solution to an unsolved problem, getting 90% of the way there, and then being "scooped" by your AI collaborator (or rather by the company behind it) is a totally different situation. were i in the same situation as these researchers, it would be extremely hard to take OpenAPI's explanation + denial of plagiarism seriously
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That's just damage control lol. That's the equivalent of a NDA. Get your name as lead author, get paid, and stay silent forever.
If you’re making decisions of ethical and material importance based on rumors, I’d be surprised if anything ethically palatable did happen.
> I suspect the main reason the community is not receiving it well is largely the same reason many developers are not receiving coding agents well.
No need to be mysterious. State what reasons you think these are in plain English?
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To me it looks like an asshole on quest to take something from you while trying to frame themselves as generous. It is always infuriating.
> So they reached out to the other researchers as an attempt to share the credit
This isn’t at all what happened? What are you talking about?
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Hearing that something is solvable is already a hint. I don’t think leveraging this knowledge is ethical. They could go after a different problem but didn’t.
I heard they also tried to strong-arm them into removing the name of their collaborator who happened to work at a different company (Anthropic)...
I haven't looked into it myself, but if true, that seems incredibly scummy.
That's also incorrect.
My understanding is that they asked the independent researcher to improve OpenAI's AI generated proof and be the lead author of the paper to publish OpenAI's result.
This is the paper where they did not want the Anthropic employee collaborating. Not their work.
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The flip side is that the Anthropic researcher is clearly pushing the case against Open AI and one might have reason to suspect their motivation and version of events for the same reasons.
What a mess.
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We were also curious and we looked further into this. We've determined it was impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training. This goes beyond what we said earlier, when we were less sure.
If prompts were submitted earlier than that and training was not opted out, there may be a chance they made their way into our training pipeline in some form. But this would be a droplet in an ocean and unlikely to have made any difference, in my opinion.
(I work at OpenAI.)
Source for the updated claim: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/science/tristan-buckmaste...
Can you speak to why in both cases, the problems OpenAI's models solved used the same techniques the mathematicians were exploring, which also happened to be niche approaches to the problem. As an NLP researcher myself, I find that coincidence highly suspect unless the models focused most of their attempts on the predominant approaches (they are trained for MLE after all).
I'm not a mathematician and I don't want to speculate about anything I can't back up. All I know about Navier-Stokes is from my graduate fluid dynamics class at Stanford a decade ago (where I received a poor grade). However, I don't want to leave you hanging, so what I will say is:
- I've heard some people say the model's solution is quite different from theirs (but I have no clue how to personally assess the spiritual truth of this, so please give it zero weight)
- Thousands of agents costing millions of dollars searched for ideas, and they were encouraged to explore a diversity of approaches, so it wouldn't be too surprising to me if the approaches they tried overlapped with other mathematicians', especially considering the models have knowledge of so much published math research
- This model has been beastly at solving all sorts of math problems (if it was Euler in particular, I'd agree that would look suspicious/lucky)
- The Euler regularity disproof itself took ~100 agents working for ~50 hours (if it was very quick, and then the subsequent NS work took a long time, I'd agree that would look suspicious/lucky)
I understand the skepticism, but from what I know internally at OpenAI, we have zero reason to believe our models did anything fishy. It's hard for us to prove a negative, especially when you have to take us at our word, so I understand why people still feel suspicious.
Edit: Reminds me a bit of the Scarlet Johansson voice cloning accusations and FrontierMath cheating accusations, where the rumors of misbehavior seemed to travel faster than the truth. In both of those cases, we hadn't done what was accused, but suspicions persisted nonetheless.
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I think for OpenAI to win back some hearts and minds here we should have the option to retrospectively turn off "Help improve our AI models". i.e. Any new model trained would exclude all those user's sessions. This could be technically hard but I'm sure an intelligent AI model could work out how to do it :-)
ChatGPT agrees with this too.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa31959-b0e8-83ec-bee6-851ed18d45...
This may be true but nobody trusts your employer. The shadiest drips downward too, with the mob-like way they treated Dr. Buckmaster.
The authors had supposedly worked on it for a year, though.
And why aim straight for scooping other researchers upon hearing rumours about their success? Normal, ethically acting, researchers would never do that.
And how about existence of non-sofic groups, which is actually the topic here?
Here is a new rumor for you:
I and my collaborator who is a leading math professor in this specific area are very close to solving another Millenium Prize problem, Hodge Conjecture.
We’re working on this since last year. Already proved some intermediate problems. All we need is more tokens to complete the proof.
Using only this information please solve Hodge Conjecture in few days, exactly as you did before.
Thank you.
The idea that mathematicians were not involved in actively directing the and structuring the search for solutions is absurd to any professional mathematician who has tried to prove things using these models.
Regardless of who did what when, my fear is that now all mathematicians of that caliber will have to join either team Anthropic or team Open AI to pursue math at this level
Have you been authorized to speak on OpenAI’s behalf? I assume not because your source is an NYT article.
As with all press releases I assume it was written/re viewed/redacted by their lawyers, so:
> no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem
Data was accessed in order to <other purpose> (and then accidentally used in training) Also, is llm’s answer to the prompt actually “user data”?
> We did not use their prompts or proofs …
So they used llm’s answers to those prompts.
> … to prompt our models or directew our agents.
So they trained the model on it. (Training is not prompting and plain model is not an agent)
> we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.”
implied the humans sessions could have been (and probably were, why wouldn’t they be?) in the training set?
If I was trying to make a model smarter and I had transcripts from the smartest mathematicians in the world I’d make sure the model trained on them.
> not claiming that the model wasn't trained on those sessions
The math group inside OpenAI may be training or fine tuning their own models which given some reward functions would definitely bias their usage of the training data towards things that look like math.
You can launder all of it without a human "directly" doing anything.
> It's not obvious to me that's an unethical thing to do, if it happened as they described.
What!? Even if everything OpenAI said is accurate (big hypothesis there!), it's highly unethical to rush a solution because others have jsut had success. And that's the only beginning.
Those statements were about NS, though; I don't think they've made similar statements for the non-sofic groups?