| ▲ | afavour 6 hours ago |
| The core section: > However, communications quickly became contentious. According to Buckmaster, OpenAI offered to give him sole authorship on the Navier-Stokes solution—but only if Alpöge’s name was removed from the work and if the write-up would acknowledge the problem had been resolved by an internal OpenAI model. Buckmaster refused, in part because he was troubled by the question of what OpenAI's system had actually seen. For example, Buckmaster said the company did not initially give him a clear answer about whether its agents had access to the pair's logs on Codex (which is an OpenAI product). > OpenAI executives have denied that any employee or AI agent saw the pair’s work before the researchers released it publicly on 7 September. But there still remains a separate question: Could the pair's work have reached OpenAI's models through its training data? > OpenAI’s blog announcing the Navier-Stokes solution does not dismiss the possibility: “While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from [Buckmaster and Alpöge’s] usage of our products helped improve our models .” |
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| ▲ | huurtehoog 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| So, this company wants everyone and every organization on Earth to use their software, and reserve the right to then tell anyone how the resulting work can be published and credited? Real solid business model there, how could it ever fail? |
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| ▲ | elgertam 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The site should have a disclaimer at the bottom: "A Sam Altman Production." | | |
| ▲ | embedding-shape 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | 99% of the world (maybe more) have 0 idea of who Sam Altman is. Add "We might take credit for things you figure out, if we can infer it from your prompts" and it might actually affect people's usage of these tools. | | |
| ▲ | dpz 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Don't say that - he'll start making sure everyone knows who he is | | |
| ▲ | MarkusQ 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think he's well on his way. Math friends that would have said "Altman who?" a week ago are now saying "Don't talk to me about that #@$!@&!" |
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| ▲ | LiamPowell 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's not what the comment you're replying to or the article says. I feel like I'm going crazy reading comments here and elsewhere, am I not reading the same articles as everyone else? | | |
| ▲ | huurtehoog 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There's a lot of unverified hearsay but the crux of the problem is that there is controversy around using this company's tools, the attribution of the resulting work, and the company for some reason competing with its users. The whole thing reeks and my point is: people won't ask for the chromatography spectrum of the turd, they will walk away. | |
| ▲ | aeon_ai 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You are. Most people have just long decided to forgo nuance for the simplicity of snark and hate as a default response |
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| ▲ | olmo23 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from [Buckmaster and Alpöge’s] usage of our products helped improve our models. Well yeah, if you use the free product they train on your data, ... I thought this was widely understood? |
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| ▲ | greggoB 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If you read Buckmasters statement, he specifically notes that they used the paid subscriptions, iirc. | | |
| ▲ | AlanYx 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >he specifically notes that they used the paid subscriptions, iirc. Where are you seeing that? He only says "We used several LLMs throughout: Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s Codex, especially with GPT-5.6 Sol and, more recently, Astra. The latter was only used for writeups and auditing our arguments." I might be missing something, but he doesn't seem to confirm that he opted out, at least in the written writeup, maybe he has on social media? He also likely had early access to Astra given the timing, and I thought early access customers couldn't opt out? (Am I wrong about that?) | | | |
| ▲ | aenis 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The paid subscriptions have opt-out for sharing data for training purposes. I think it's on by default. | | |
| ▲ | y-curious 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don’t know because I use Anthropic, but I would eat my hat if this was on by default. | | |
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| ▲ | Tenemo 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Paying for an account doesn't opt you out by itself, right? Has he stated anywhere that he actually opted out? But if not, then I also don't understand why OpenAI's communications about this have been so vague, they could've just said that he didn't opt out, using those chats in training data follows their ToS and that's it (whether that's "fair" is a separate discussion). | | |
| ▲ | dgellow 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | We don’t need to guess, OpenAI pretty much indirectly they had the chats in their data set. OpenAI responses are the most suspicious part of that whole controversy, the fact they do not provide straight answers is not a sign of a good faith actor here | |
| ▲ | Topfi 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There has been no statement either way, as far as I could find beyond them only using commercially available models, though given Alpöges employer, I'd be surprised if they didn't opt out. In any case, for such work, ZDR or self-hosting seem to be an absolute must now. Unless OpenAI can show that training was permitted, this will erode the limited trust that many users have had in such toggles and may lead to further, uncomfortable inquiries. |
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| ▲ | Topfi 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They did pay [0] and substantially by the sound of things: > I pay for the tools my group uses out of my own research funds, including footing a large bill to OpenAI. [0] https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf | |
| ▲ | Arodex 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Then OpenAI should acknowledge that they can't prove they solved the problem independently, and credit the external researchers. It cuts both ways: if OpenAI really needs to access user data, even anonymised, to improve its models, they have to waive any pretention to solve "independently" any problem other people worked on with its tools. Otherwise they (OpenAI) have to firewall/cleanroom themselves. |
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| ▲ | jrflo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I could see their comment on user training data as a bit of a CYA statement, but removing Alpoge from the paper is awful. Has really soured what could have been a huge moment for AI progress. |
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| ▲ | JohnKemeny 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > but only if Alpöge’s name was removed This is blatant scientific misconduct. |
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| ▲ | gus_massa 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | IIUC, the accusation was not to try to remove Alpöge from the paper he wrote with Buckmaster solving the "easier" conjeture, but to exclude Alpöge in the followup paper where Buckmaster review the OpenAI solution of the "full" conjeture. For comparison, if you offer me to collaborate in a paper about Algebra I may agree to go alone, but if the paper is about Quantum Chemistry I have to piggyback a few coworkers because we are collaborating in that topic for a long time and I already discussed may of the topics and I may even discuss the new paper too. | | |
| ▲ | returningfory2 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah I think the verb "removed" is not the right verb here, because the paper in question is OpenAI's hypothetical paper which Alpöge is not on in the first place. |
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| ▲ | Gabrys1 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Any idea why OpenAI cared about this name removed from the paper? | | |
| ▲ | cman1444 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Because he works for Anthropic. Supposedly this project was not part of his official capacity as an employee of theirs. However, if they had published first, it's hard to imagine Anthropic not taking the opportunity to claim "our employee solved this Millennium prize problem using our AI". | | |
| ▲ | dguest 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > [the Open AI rep] twice asserted that he wanted Levent removed from authorship, and said it would all be simple if only it were not the case that, and it was so annoying that, Levent works at Anthropic. Later on the author claims that the OpenAI rep threatened to ruin his career if he didn't go along with them. Worth noting that there were two versions of the problem: - the proof in the equations with viscosity (which OpenAI claims to have solved), and - the proof with no viscosity (which Tristian and Levent solved) What is confusing is that if OpenAI can prove their independence from Levent and Tristian, they could take full credit for proving the viscous version of the problem. Offering to give one author credit for something they proved seems like a strange choice: if nothing else it seems obvious that it would drive a very deep wedge between the two authors of the non-viscous version. see https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf#page=3 | | |
| ▲ | rocqua 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | It seems very hard for OpenAI to prove that independence. Since they seem unable to exclude the possibility that their model was trained on transcripts by the two mathematicians. | | |
| ▲ | dguest 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | If that's true, either they both deserve credit or neither of them do. You don't just average 0 and 2 and decide that <n> = 1 person deserves credit. | | |
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| ▲ | Gabrys1 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Ah, I missed that part, thanks! |
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| ▲ | treis 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They didn't want his name removed from any paper. The invitation was to write a new joint paper between Buckmaster and OpenAI. An invitation Alpoge couldn't accept and OpenAI wouldn't make since he worked for a competitor. | |
| ▲ | Topfi 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | He works for Anthropic nowadays. |
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