What reason could OpenAI possibly have to lie about their own performance? The fact they were desperate enough for a PR win they stole the research leading to the Millenium problem further hurts their case imo.

Two things can be true. Open AI is a huge company.

1. It has people in it who are career obsessed and who are willing to ruthlessly go after any opportunity to improve their standing/stock valuation. Using a 2 week old model to snipe a millenium prize for PR is in line with that.

2. There are many researchers and even executives at the company who genuinely think we are speedrunning the end of the world. I don’t know anyone in this field who honestly argues that if we build ASI soon it doesn’t lead to extinction. This group of people can output warnings about the state of research and fears for the future while pushing for regulation out of genuine fear of what they’re building. I tend to agree with them.

You can’t view these companies as a monolith. They’re actions won’t be consistent because it’s built of many people with conflicting beliefs. Please look at arguments regarding AI risk and the current pace of progress and value them as it relates to the argument itself, not who said it. We are in a dangerous place and no one is sure how quickly we’ll get to a bad spot.

The fact they were desperate enough for a PR win they stole the research

I guess people are just going to keep spreading misinformation about this, along the same lines as "Anthropic's C compiler fails on hello world". There is zero indication that they stole anything, unless it counts as "stealing" to spin up a bunch of compute based on rumors that the problem had been solved already.

they lied about their performance by.... solving a famously hard problem to solve?

Edit:

The "reputable academic" who accused OpenAI had to say this about LLMs and the recent result.

source: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf

> “the results are not the important thing.”

> “the important thing is instead the significance that a mathematician and an LLM model can now do all this work in a month.”

> “This is a Deep Blue-Kasparov moment.”

> “incredibly important developments.”

> “If indeed an OpenAI model did close the gap to Navier-Stokes, that is a remarkable thing and it should be said loudly, by them, with the history intact.”

Clearly Buckmaster (who is probably one of the most accomplished academics in the field) himself doesn't believe that AI has stalled. What makes you think you are right?