He may be hinting that solving these complex mathematical problems will boost OpenAI clients' confidence and encourage them to spend millions of dollars on solving other complex problems.

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HarHarVeryFunny 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I would think it would have the exact opposite effect.

Why would anyone use OpenAI models for anything commercially valuable, or where secrecy is important, when it appears that if OpenAI "becomes aware" that you are doing so they may try to compete with you?

Not only did OpenAI, by their own admission, rush to re-solve Navier-Stokes once they heard the rumor that it has been solved (the rumor being that it was Anthropic that had done it), but they are leaving the door open ("we cannot rule out that") as to whether the model they used to do it had been trained on the anonymized date from the researchers who's approach they ended up copying.

Terrance Tao has recently said as much for mathematics - that there appears to be a trend (not just this Navier-Stokes incident) of the AI companies going after math problems wherever there is an "rumor" of progress, and that he thinks this may sadly result in breakthrough mathematics being conducted in secret to avoid this.

The rush to steal another researcher's thunder is bad enough, but it also appears that one of OpenAI's employees acted in a very thuggish manner to try to threaten the professor who had been working on this not to publish and to co-operate with their telling of the story.

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famouswaffles 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>but they are leaving the door open ("we cannot rule out that") as to whether the model they used to do it had been trained on the anonymized date from the researchers who's approach they ended up copying.

This is just lawyer speak. Maybe there was a small reward from a possible thumbs up on any of the chat sessions. Open AI have no way of knowing if that happened or not and the chances that, if this did happen, that it had anything to do with their solution of Navier Stokes is extremely unlikely.

>to try to threaten the professor who had been working on this not to publish and to co-operate with their telling of the story.

There was never a threat to not publish their own work with whatever credit to whoever. This was about the offer to be a lead author on the paper that Open AI authored, an invitation that was not extended to Levant.

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HarHarVeryFunny 3 hours ago | parent [-]

OpenAI know the exact timelines involved, and what they train on, or do not.

You're right - it is exactly "lawyer speak", rather like Bill Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman".

	▲	famouswaffles 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes they know the timelines, which they've explained. No they don't know exactly what they train on. Even I don't, and my little experiments are nowhere near OpenAI scale. This is par the course for ML. Plus it would kind of defeat the purpose of de-anonimization if they could.

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vbezhenar 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Because AI supposedly provides a significant advantage over not using AI and those who would trust OpenAI might get a significant edge.

	▲	HarHarVeryFunny 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They might, or they might just get out-spent and scooped by OpenAI. This isn't the way you build trust.