The irony is that OpenAI got into this trouble only because they tried to play "nice". They told Buckmaster that he could publish the final result as the author as long as he removed Alpöge from the author list. They wanted to give Buckmaster a chance to be the one solved N-S problem.

While this behavior is highly questionable, if OpenAI just published the final result without notifying Buckmaster first and simply cited his previous researches, there would be no ground for anyone to accuse OpenAI for anything. Their self-perceived "generosity" backfired dearly and I'm sure they'll never make the same mistake again. There is probably a policy forbidding any OpenAI employee to contact external researchers like that now.

No.

1. Buckmaster contacted OpenAI first. Not the other way.

2. Giving the $1M bounty to a human mathematician for the effort and giving him credit would be excellent PR. They had already burned much more than $1M for the generation. Adding him as author also costs nothing. Purely pragmatical.

3. “As long as he removed Alpöge” part itself is against academic honesty by all means.

4. Buckmaster rejected fame and $1M only because doing (3) would be wrong. That’s a perfect example of honesty. That can’t be overstated.

5. After the rejection OpenAI guy (Sebastien) did’t say, “ok bye”. He threatened Buckmaster to “end his career”.

6. At that point OpenAI was not sure if they really used his conversations in their proof. He basically wanted to buy him to control any damage.

7. They omitted Buckmaster’s published work and any other related work in their References section. Also an academic malpractice.

If you see generosity and niceness in all of this you are either too naive or your name is Sebastien.

> if OpenAI just published the final result without notifying Buckmaster first and simply cited his previous researched, there would be no ground for anyone to accuse OpenAI for anything

Yes, there would? They would have left off Buckmaster as a precedent whose work they potentially relied on.

The reality would be the same. They probably used prior session history between the research and Astra to train the internal model, and used it to front run-the researcher.

This is the biggest self-own in the history of software. If you can relate to Pixar, OpenAI is Chick Hicks celebrating at the end of the Piston Cup and wondering why he's getting booed.

The lack of self-awareness is something to behold, and says a lot about their corporate values.