> 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 5 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 5 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 4 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 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		So because they didn’t admit to it they didn’t do it?
	▲	iAMkenough 3 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...