I think people are focusing on the training data issue too much. If the data was contaminated, I can still blame that on negligence.

But, at least with the Navier-Stokes solution, it's clear [^1] that they learned that Alpöge and Buckmaster were getting close to a solution and learned of the general approach they were taking. Only after learning the secret to cracking the problem did they send the first prompt.

What makes this worse to me is the intention. They intentionally threw $15 million in compute at the problem in order to scoop the result. They intentionally left Buckmaster and Alpöge out of the citations.

Data contamination should be enough to disqualify them from the prize, but I can believe it to be accidental. On the other hand, someone made an intentional decision to scoop the result by throwing money at the problem. That's so much worse.

[^1]: That's the timeline claimed by Buckmaster, and no one from OAI has disputed it.

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square_usual 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> and learned of the general approach they were taking. Only after learning the secret to cracking the problem did they send the first prompt.

Do you have any evidence of this? They don't dispute the timeline, but they never said they knew what Levant/Buckmaster were doing.

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robotpepi 5 hours ago | parent [-]

It's in OpenAI's first announcement that they had solved the problem.

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derangedHorse 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Only after learning the secret to cracking the problem did they send the first prompt.

Which quote in the announcement post provides evidence for the above quote?

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OneManyNone 4 hours ago | parent [-]

“ On Tuesday, September 1, we heard rumors that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved. Inspired by these rumors and by the step change in performance of our internal model, we launched an effort to evaluate it on all open Millennium Prize problems and a few other high-impact problems.”

- https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

They do not explicitly admit to knowing about NS specifically, but are extremely explicit that they tried to scoop some potential millennium prize winners.

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randomblock1 3 hours ago | parent [-]

So then they DIDN'T "learn the secret to cracking the problem". They simply knew that part of the problem was solved. Knowing a problem can be solved and knowing the solution are not the same thing.

	▲	dekhn 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The claim that OpenAI somehow used the mathematicians' ideas to leapfrog them seems unsupported at this time and IMHO it was irresponsible to bring it up because credulous people will immediately believe that narrative. And from my perspective, if some math folks typing in a few questions to OpenAI provides sufficient training data for OpenAI to solve a big problem... that's amazing! A few conversations/prompts out of the billions that OpenAI trains on lead to this result- that means there is an awful lot of low-hanging fruit that could be exploited cheaply.
	▲	mcmcmc an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		So because they didn’t admit to it they didn’t do it?
	▲	iAMkenough 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I like how the comment below summarizes it: > learning the answer might be in model X’s training data made them believe that model X specifically might be able to solve the question, and they were able to very quickly find enough certainty about the former to commit millions of dollars to the latter. They don’t need to know, because their IP stealing machine knows for them. They just have to buy enough compute, and someone else’s work is theirs.
	▲	freejazz 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah, and suckers are born every day...

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

I think you’re overlooking what I’m implying here. It’s not that they knew contamination was possible but they went ahead anyway. To spell it out just a little bit more: learning the answer might be in model X’s training data made them believe that model X specifically might be able to solve the question, and they were able to very quickly find enough certainty about the former to commit millions of dollars to the latter.

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unified101 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> the secret

So such thing existed. In fact, what they learnt was some progress existed, not what the specific progress was.

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freejazz 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> but I can believe it to be accidental

What accident is it when the system is designed to function that way?

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Lerc 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Their claim is that training on their solution is "unlikely but possible".

Consider this scenario.

Has a google crawler read my new novel, which I may or may not have posted on my blog, page by page, as I wrote it?

Can you, without knowledge of what I have actually done, claim that the google crawler has not seen the novel?

Without any evidence that I have posted the novel online, it might be tempting to say that the crawler has not seen the novel, but what if I were in an adversarial position against Google on this topic and were challenging them to make that claim. You would wonder if I were hoping Google to overreach by making a definitive claim without taking into account some action that they had no knowledge of. It becomes difficult to use the scientific expression "There is no evidence for this" when there is an accusation of malfeasance because it can be so easily be conflated as "You can't prove we did it". It seems like the best you could say would be 'Unlikely, but possible'

	▲	freejazz an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not taking them at their word, sorry. Genuinely, there is no reason to.

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lnrd 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> They intentionally threw $15 million in compute at the problem

what? really?

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abathologist an hour ago | parent [-]

Yes. Maybe much more:

> Such intensive use of AI doesn't come cheap. In a post on X, LisanBench, an LLM benchmark evaluator, estimated that the output tokens alone would cost about $6.5 million at OpenAI's average consumer price. Including the far larger volume of input tokens, the post estimated the total could reach $10 million to $40 million.

https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-math-problem-solved-t...

	▲	square_usual 23 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That's their API pricing. There's no way they actually paid $15M in compute. I'd say much more likely it's in the order of $1M.
	▲	hyperbovine 27 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		But think of all the IPO Monopoly money they just generated.