They could have thought about the problem for like 2 minutes and not done this! I think that literally any academic mathematician could have explained to them, had they asked, why it is considered extraordinarily rude to react to rumors of research progress by desperately rushing to get there first.

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fooker 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I think that literally any academic mathematician could have explained to them, had they asked, why it is considered extraordinarily rude to react to rumors of research progress by desperately rushing to get there first.

Pretty much all of math and science history is basically this pattern again and again. I'm sure all of that was rude as well.

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SpicyLemonZest 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Being scooped is not a new phenomenon, but the scooper's story is almost always that they were working on the problem independently or had some independent insight into it. By OpenAI's own account, they were inspired to start working on this by rumors that there might be Millennium Prize solutions to scoop.

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fooker 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Research projects don't start in a vacuum.

It never happens that you wake up one morning and start working on a new problem that came to you in a dream (*unless you are Ramanujan).

This is business as usual for academia, it's amusing to the discussion over it.

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rf_physics 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Apologies if this is against the rules, but could I ask if you have some background in scientific research (maybe you could elaborate lightly on topics you've worked on)?

From my perspective, this practice is quite bad mannered, unusual, and heavily frowned upon, but I recognize it's possible that these stories might be more common in other fields. Still, I'd appreciate a strong sign that you aren't making these statements up based on secondhand accounts of what 'academia is usually like'.

	▲	fooker 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		CS PhD, used to be a professor, have worked at several industry research labs since. > this practice is quite bad mannered, unusual, and heavily frowned upon, Yes, it is. Maybe you missed my point? The fact that is "quite bad mannered, unusual, and heavily frowned upon" does not stop it from happening, and it is common for all high profile inventions and discoveries. This does not disqualify the person doing the scooping, history remembers them as having the credit, and quietly forgets the person who was scooped.

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SpicyLemonZest 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If it's all business as usual and being scooped is no big deal, why was OpenAI in such a rush? They didn't have to launch this effort on the very day they heard the rumor, run "on the order of 10,000 concurrent agents", or try to coordinate announcement scheduling with Buckmaster in the middle of a long weekend. It seems to me that they understood very well this was not a "business as usual" announcement, and devoted huge amounts of money and focus to maximize the chance that they were first.

	▲	fooker 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think you're making the opposite conclusion than what I intended? Being scooped is a big deal for the one getting scooped. It has never been a big deal for the one doing the scooping. History is full of math and science results being scooped. For example, we keep calling it Pythagoras' theorem a few thousand years later.

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railgunmerlin 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

right, surely they could've waited or even reached out? It reads as desperation to get there for marketing purposes

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pwign 7 hours ago | parent [-]

They did reach out.

> Our effort began on September 1st after hearing a rumor which we later realized was related to Levent Alpöge, an Anthropic employee, and Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at NYU. After the completion of our full project and Lean verification (on September 6th), believing from the rumor they also had a solution of Navier–Stokes, we reached out to them to offer a concurrent release of our result and to recognize their priority in a joint announcement. At that point we found out that they had a resolution of the forced Euler problem. In these discussions we offered them visibility into all of the prompts we used and later to see the proof. We recognize the priority of their work on forced Euler and congratulate them on their remarkable mathematical achievement.

	▲	QuesnayJr 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		We've heard from Buckmaster, who says that they demanded a condition of cutting Alpöge of all credit. If true, it doesn't make them look too good.
	▲	railgunmerlin 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

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QuesnayJr 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It seems like this is going to be a PR nightmare, because they are now competing with their own customers. If you're using an LLM to help with your bright idea to cure cancer, you're going to have second thoughts about relying on OpenAI.