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mayakacz 2 hours ago

I'm not one to comment often but this really pisses me off.

OpenAI looked at user data, stole world class researchers' work, and then tried to threaten those researchers to do what would make their corporation profit (which they would anyways!).

Imagine you have been working on a terribly difficult math problem for a decade. This is a result you have spent years on, and what you will likely be remembered for. And to have some punk from OpenAI lie to you, threaten you, and tell you that they are willing to go on the record that you "deserved" it? What is this, the Godfather?

If OpenAI solved Navier-Stokes, that is an astounding result! - yet they'll still be remembered as those who thought credit was more important than results. That winning was more important than collaboration. If this is true, they're burning any trust left with academia.

postalcoder 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm stunned that people are taking this accusation as a fact.

OpenAI is no stranger to rivalry with Anthropic but 1. it's not like user data is sitting around on some kitchen table somewhere and 2. I consider OpenAI to be as economically motivated as any other actor in this space and playing around with user data like that would destroy their business.

There are things that Buckmaster alleged and things that he speculated. The entire training data thing is speculation. If this is pissing you off, then you ought to evaluate how you ingest information.

dash2 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

He didn't even make that accusation!

> I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer.

The shocking/interesting thing would be if it was trained on the sessions. I think it's very implausible that they gave the model access to someone else's sessions as input. That would be a huge privacy violation and would probably blow up a large proportion of their enterprise business.

Does openAI train on user conversations in general? I assume so. But so fast as that? That seems unlikely in general. I expect OpenAI will come out denying this.

Traster 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Parse that statement more carefully.

> I was told the model did not look up user data.

The naive way to read this is "Nothing you guys did influenced the way our model got to the solution".

The less naive way to read this is "Of course the model isn't looking up your user data. I (the guy trying to blackmail you to remove the Anthropic employee from credit on your paper) looked up your sessions, and tipped our model off on how to solve this problem".

revolvingthrow an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It would be shocking if it wasn’t trained on sessions. Have you read the ToS parts for both openai and anthropic that talk about it? It’s so obviously a weaselly way to say "no we do not train on your exact chats but we talked with legal and we think a cleanroom reimagining of your convo is probably fine and frankly where else are we going to get such a treasure trove of training data?"

There’s potentially trillions on the line, do you seriously expect those companies to adhere to laws and regulations any more than, say, uber?

The only unlikely part is the timeline - your sessions from a week ago probably haven’t made their way into the model. It’ll just take a while longer, and will be massaged just enough so that it isn’t really your exact session word for word so you can’t sure as easily.

johnnienaked an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It wouldn't be shocking at all. They stole human data to train the first models and they've been stealing it ever since to train new models. Stealing mathematicians private chats and private research and taking credit for it would absolutely be par for the course.

Enterprises are well aware of it and are fully on board. You didn't think every corporation in America has an OpenAI subscription because the models were good, did you?

The whole reason they have subs is to train them on YOUR WORKFLOWS lol

howdareme an hour ago | parent [-]

They are not training a whole model in a matter of days

actionfromafar an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Couldn't the Enterprise have a different fine print?

FiberBundle an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Whenever I see comments defending AI companies, I look at the account's creation date, and interestingly almost all of them were created post 2024.

az226 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don’t think you understand how brazen big tech companies are in practice.

thereitgoes456 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

He asked whether they used their chats as training data and received no response. Any speculation here seems quite appropriate?

an hour ago | parent [-]
[deleted]
johnnienaked an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

They stole it.

tristanj an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This conclusion is flawed. It's unclear at this point if OpenAI's model or employees actually looked at or stole the author's data. Having worked at large companies before, I'm leaning towards no, since very few employees have access to that data.

And simply knowing a problem can be solved is half the battle.

dbdr an hour ago | parent | next [-]

From Buckmaster's text:

    The route to the Clay problem through a
    smooth force, options c and d in Fefferman’s statement of the problem, is the
    route Luis and Diego opened and the one Levent and I had quietly chosen to
    attack. Almost nobody else I know of was working on it. It is not the direction
    one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement. When I
    heard “forced,” it was a bright red flag.
This is much more than the knowledge than the problem can be solved, it's also the specific, non-obvious approach to solving it. That's much more damning for OpenAI, if confirmed.
tristanj an hour ago | parent | next [-]

That's a stretch. The Luis and Diego paper was published in 2023 and is included in every frontier model's training dataset. An AI model could independently choose the same path route as Luis and Diego, without access to Buckmaster and Alpöge’s work.

And the article states "an insane amount of compute had been used," which implies OpenAI brute-forced their way to a solution. I.e. they searched for every paper published on Navier-Stokes and exhaustively attempted every approach. Such an approach would lead them to a solution.

There is not enough information at this time to reach a conclusion. The best option is to wait for statements from both sides, then reevaluate.

Keyframe an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

johnnienaked an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

How is it unclear? The entire point of deploying models across corporate America is to train on your workflows. Eventually replacing you with digital you is why they're doing it!

scurnus 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Things are more entangled than that. The contribute made from both OpenAI and Anthropic models to solve these problems are clear, now it really hard to quantify which one contributed more, if the role played by the human is major or minor.

OpenAI tried to collaborate and share the results together with a fixed timeline, to avoid this mess but it was inevitable. There is a conflict of interest, where the other researcher works at Anthropic, who will also try to take credit.

Where they may be in the wrong is if they took user data regarding the problem, how will we know if they did or not?

sk4rekr0w 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, but only if you take this one sided statement at face value.

tigershark 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why would have they rushed the publication if this was not true? Are you also suggesting that he fully invented the call with Open AI?

famouswaffles 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The results being true, the 'deal' that was made being true doesn't mean some of the implied accusations here are true, for example - that Open AI used their Codex logs to drive their breakthrough.

PowerElectronix an hour ago | parent | next [-]

How else would you explain OpenAI suddendly assembling a team focused on working the same problem from the same angle than the researchers that just made a breakthrough?

famouswaffles 24 minutes ago | parent [-]

What would be so hard to explain?

That OpenAI heard about the result and decided to throw a lot of money at it knowing it was within reach ?

That the model took an approach that was published years ago ?

tigershark 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So are you baselessly assuming that he is lying? He explicitly reported that he was threatened and your answer here is to defend OpenAI no matter what.

famouswaffles an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Do you not have reading comprehension? Did you even read the statement? He himself asserts at the end he doesn't know if the above example is true or not. What on earth are you going on about? Where in my comment am I assuming he's lying ?

tigershark an hour ago | parent [-]

From my post above: > He explicitly reported that *he was threatened* and your answer here is to defend OpenAI no matter what.

Yes, I read fully the statement, what about you? Do you know what is a threat? What is this in your super-humble opinion if not a threat:

> 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.”

And you are saying that I don't have reading comprehension...

sk4rekr0w an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You really lack reading comprehension

tigershark an hour ago | parent [-]

My reading comprehension is pretty good, I'm not the one that doesn't recognize a threat even when it's perfectly clear. Verbatim from the statement:

> 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.”

thereitgoes456 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m open to evidence, but just using Bayesian reasoning, OpenAI is one of the most dishonest companies in history. They’re currently being sued for a dozen employees stealing Apple hardware! I don’t understand why I should give them any grace.

johnnienaked an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

LLMs do nothing but steal, and the companies that own them are fully aware and eager to do it.