Comment by tedsanders
14 hours ago
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.
It's just conflict of interest. OpenAI is trying to get billions and billions and there's so much at stake. You spend millions trying to preempt two guys. It just makes you seem like a big bully. People would get angry even if it was esports or football.
Hearing "rumors" and just trying to overtake them and then asking to collaborate instead of starting out offering the resources beforehand. Just sounds like strong arming. Just doesn't sit right with me.
What was the "truth" in the Johansson case? Many, many people who heard the voice immediately thought it was Johansson's voice, or some kind of sound-alike, presumably picked because she voiced the computer in a popular film. From NPR:
> Johansson said that nine months ago [i.e. mid 2023] Altman approached her proposing that she allow her voice to be licensed for the new ChatGPT voice assistant. He thought it would be "comforting to people" who are uneasy with AI technology.
> "After much consideration and for personal reasons, I declined the offer," Johansson wrote.
> Just two days before the new ChatGPT was unveiled, Altman again reached out to Johansson's team, urging the actress to reconsider, she said.
> But before she and Altman could connect, the company publicly announced its new, splashy product, complete with a voice that she says appears to have copied her likeness.
> To Johansson, it was a personal affront.
> "I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference," she said.
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I think the reason people are suspicious is that OAI has shown itself to act a bit irresponsibly, especially recently. As two examples, of course it was artifactory, why wasn't that watched more closely, especially after the first instance; editing /etc/hosts is rather embarrassing, that's the front door
As for training, we all know that filtering is incredibly difficult unless there's direct logs. It's also easy for mistakes to happen. Is it really not possible that some employee just accidentally primed the model? Is it possible that the model saw internal communications? I mean OAI has famously shown that they aren't good at monitoring their agents and that their agents love to break out of their sandboxes.
So there's no reason for the public to trust OAI right now. But they have every reason to distrust them.
I think it'd be more good faith if you referred more to the actions of people in the organization (e.g. who allotted or drove "millions of dollars" in agent usage?) than "the model" in describing what happens.
> 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)
Why would you include a statement that you want us to give zero weight to, unless you don’t actually want us to give it zero weight?
> we have zero reason to believe our models did anything fishy.
Obviously. They cannot do anything "fishy". They are just computer programs.
Now, how about their operators?
OK bro.
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...
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?
This may be true but nobody trusts your employer. The shadiest drips downward too, with the mob-like way they treated Dr. Buckmaster.
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.