Comment by HarHarVeryFunny
14 hours ago
Brubeck has admitted what he said, but claims he immediately retracted it as a "poor choice of words".
Given Buckmaster's telling, this seems beyond "poor choice of words"... It was a veiled threat, that he then doubled down on with his "If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice." follow-up.
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I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”
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FWIW there are also other people on Twitter, such as this DeepMind researcher, saying this is a pattern for Brubeck.
https://x.com/dheeraj_nagaraj/status/2097266146445774924?s=2...
Can you specify what leverage you think Brubeck has over an independent professor's career in order to make threats?
I see none, and consequently Brubeck's explanation makes more sense to me. I understand he meant these words, which he supposedly retracted on the spot, in a "why would you ruin your career with this behavior / turning down the opportunity I am offering" way.
You don't think that is the likely explanation?
I'm not sure the value of speculating, but since you insist...
If someone said to you "you're going to regret this, mo-fo!", do you really need to suppose they had a specific plan in mind, rather than just intent to intimidate?
If you want to suppose that Brubeck had a concrete plan for how he would ruin Buskmaster's career, then my best guess would be that he was threatening for OpenAI to publish without giving any credit to Buckmaster (who has been working on Euler overall for at least 10 years). Obviously this would be absurd, but no more absurd than what Brubeck was also demanding - that Levant was excluded for any credit and could not have him name on any OpenAI writeup (with this being the exact sticking point that Buckmaster was refusing to accept).
The funny thing is that this threat, as is often the case, seems to say more about the insecurities of the person making the threat than the person they are directing it to.
Bubeck made no such demands, particularly not for removing Levent from authorship of his own work.
What they discussed was that Bubeck felt it would be inappropriate for an Anthropic employee to author the proposed rewrite of OpenAI's proof.
Fair enough then. I had only seen some earlier comments.