6 ms·

The allegations of contamination (using Tristan and Levent's work) aren't very well evidenced, but this behavior by OpenAI (from the authors' statement) makes t

by colinhb 28d ago

The allegations of contamination (using Tristan and Levent's work) aren't very well evidenced, but this behavior by OpenAI (from the authors' statement) makes them seem like the bad guys: > I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.” Threatening a research mathematician and dangling and $1M payday to dissociate from his research collaborators and to adopt OpenAI's narrative is bad stuff.

igleria 28d ago
I´m waiting on the other side version, because I know there is no justifiable way to talk to a person like they did. Sociopathic behaviour.
- Maxious 28d ago
  OpenAI version of events conceed some of the words alleged to have been used may have been used https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140 https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310
  - igleria 28d ago
    Interesting that they quote the mathematician directly: “there is nothing you can do, I simply do not trust you” but then they proceed to NOT quote themselves themselves verbatim: "I deeply apologize for this extremely poor choice of words, it is the opposite of what I was trying to convey."
    - deleted 28d ago
      [deleted]
    - andrepd 28d ago
      > "I deeply apologize for this extremely poor choice of words, it is the opposite of what I was trying to convey." The AI-isms are seeping into their speech :)
  - colinhb 28d ago
    May be unfairly jaded or just well calibrated given the body of evidence, but I can't help but think of another quote about OpenAI leadership: > Not consistently candid
    - Laurel1234 28d ago
      [dead]
  - peri-cl 28d ago
    > "When we learned that they had Euler but not Navier-Stokes, we offered to let them go first, to suggest that they should be the ones to get the prize, and optionally for Tristan to be the lead author on a rewrite of the OpenAI proof. We felt it was challenging to offer the same to Levent (an Anthropic employee), who was not willing to talk or coordinate with us anyway. We were open to other solutions." What an admission! "We tried to defraud Alpöge out of sharing the Millenium Prize (that we don't dispute he might actually deserve), for no other reason than he works for our competitor and that inconveniences us". I thought Tristan Buckmaster's allegations sounded fantastic; and then 'sama just came out (tweet's ~30 minutes old) and admitted to all of them. Wow!
    - dandanua 28d ago
      Can't wait for the moment when AGI realizes how stupid and dishonest its owners are.
      - aeve890 28d ago
        Wait, people now want AGI to be sentient too?
    - fc417fc802 28d ago
      That isn't what the quoted passage says though? The claim by openai (no idea if true) is that they offered to wait for the other two to claim the prize before publishing their own work. Separately, they also offered to let one of the pair (but not the other) become an author on their own separate work.
  - mrbungie 28d ago
    In what world a tweet and a screenshot of a private convo are evidence of good faith? Plain sociopathic behavior.
- CobrastanJorji 28d ago
  As soon as I thought "man, this sounds like some evil sociopath shit," my second thought was "oh, Sam Altman must have been personally involved."
  - morkalork 28d ago
    I can sort of picture Sam Altman screaming "I drink your milkshake" at some poor researcher who foolishly used chatgpt/codex to aid in their work now.
- morleytj 27d ago
  Talking like that and threatening an academic like that is crazy. I read the explanations Altman and the others posted and they completely skip over the whole "I don't have to be nice" style threats.
peri-cl 28d ago
(To help people keep track: that's OpenAI (allegedly) threatening Tristan Buckmaster (NYU) to remove Levent Alpöge as a co-author. Alpöge is a well-known[0] Anthropic mathematician). [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Alpöge https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Alpöge (also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49412947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49412947 the Hopf conjecture)
apical_dendrite 28d ago
Their own tweets are also pretty eyebrow-raising: > One option we discussed was that Tristan could be the lead author on a rewrite of OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes proof. It is in that context that I said “it would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee” because I felt it would be inappropriate for an Anthropic employee to author OpenAI’s work. Why would you offer another researcher the lead authorship on your groundbreaking paper if you thought you had developed it independently?
- dgellow 28d ago
  And why cannot they have someone associated with Anthropic as co-author? That’s not obvious at all. For sure they would prefer to be the only ones, but it’s pretty standard to have co-authors from different companies, even if they are technically competitors. What is inappropriate about it?
  - dboreham 28d ago
    It's inappropriate if you're a sociopath.
  - egillie 28d ago
    in another world this could have been a beautiful collaboration
  - xdavidliu 28d ago
    because it severely dilutes the PR value.
  - orangecat 28d ago
    If writing up the paper would involve using OpenAI's unreleased model, neither OpenAI nor Anthropic would be happy about Alpöge having that access.
  - xdavidliu 28d ago
    would edit my comment but it's been a few hours > but it’s pretty standard to have co-authors from different companies that's only true for papers that are not millenium problem solutions
charm137 28d ago
It's astounding that the thought to dissociate one of the mathematicians from the proposed publication was driven by their corporate institutional affiliation - and that that exclusion was suggested by a scientist themselves! This is like a researcher from CMU saying to an NYU researcher that their collaborator, being from MIT, is a problem - this is as ridiculous as that! Progress in humanity's knowledge now has to play second fiddle to narrow corporate interests as IPO timings near (both of which wouldn't exist anyway if generations of mathematicians hadn't paved the way for AIs to become as good as they have).
- curt15 28d ago
  The scientist allegedly making that request comes from a machine learning background. Perhaps he's not familiar with the culture in mathematics regarding authorship. That sort of squabbling over author priority would be unconscionable to mathematicians.
  - tensor 28d ago
    No, it's common to list authors alphabetically in a lot of computer science journals too.
  - contubernio 28d ago
    Bubeck is familiar with how publishing works in mathematics.
hkmaxpro 28d ago
Both Sam Altman and Sebastien Bubeck admitted they only want Buckmaster to be the lead author on a rewrite of the OpenAI proof. https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140 https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310 A wake up call for using OpenAI models. If you discover something with their model and you work for a competitor, they “felt it would be inappropriate” for you “to author OpenAI’s work”.
- igleria 28d ago
  If I was a company with a zero data retention contract involving OAI I would be asking for a third party audit of such claim of zero retention like, yesterday.
  - linkregister 28d ago
    Is there an implication of violation of ZDR here? Not a challenge. Just a request for clarification.
    - dakolli 28d ago
      By the way, the company that made it's entire product off of stealing all data it could get it's hand on while violating copyright and pirating, is not all of a sudden going to respect your data. If you think OpenAI or any major AI lab is going to give you true ZDR, I have a bridge to sell you.
      - fc417fc802 28d ago
        So use bedrock or vertex or whatever. Those are the ZDR offerings. Or was it your intention to insinuate that the major cloud providers are conspiring with openai to violate their contractual obligations to their customers?
        dakolli 28d ago
olalonde 28d ago
Playing the devil's advocate here but it's true that OpenAI didn't have to make those offers.
- 20k 28d ago
  They kind of did though, they were hoping to keep the fact that they may well have plagiarised these researchers unpublished work quiet. They did not want this to turn into a scandal about the fact that they appear to be training on prompts without consent It makes a certain amount of sense. The internet data is too polluted with AI usage now to be useful, so the only AI free new data source is the prompts people feed into ChatGPT. The only problem is that its clearly plagiarism Edit: OpenAI have admitted to training on prompts at the time the breakthrough was made: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117236471352470303 https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/11723647135247030...
  - za_creature 28d ago
    > the only AI free new data source is the prompts hmmmmmmmmmm
  - olalonde 28d ago
    OpenAI claims the data contamination issue only surfaced after they proactively reached out to Buckmaster and Alpöge to coordinate a joint release. They also say that even if there was some contamination, the underlying proofs diverge substantially: > Our effort began on September 1st after hearing a rumor which we later realized was related to Levent Alpöge, an Anthropic employee, and Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at NYU. After the completion of our full project and Lean verification (on September 6th), believing from the rumor they also had a solution of Navier–Stokes, we reached out to them to offer a concurrent release of our result and to recognize their priority in a joint announcement. At that point we found out that they had a resolution of the forced Euler problem. In these discussions we offered them visibility into all of the prompts we used and later to see the proof. We recognize the priority of their work on forced Euler and congratulate them on their remarkable mathematical achievement.

by colinhb 28d ago

igleria 28d ago

I´m waiting on the other side version, because I know there is no justifiable way to talk to a person like they did. Sociopathic behaviour.

Maxious 28d ago
OpenAI version of events conceed some of the words alleged to have been used may have been used https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140 https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310
- igleria 28d ago
  Interesting that they quote the mathematician directly: “there is nothing you can do, I simply do not trust you” but then they proceed to NOT quote themselves themselves verbatim: "I deeply apologize for this extremely poor choice of words, it is the opposite of what I was trying to convey."
  - deleted 28d ago
    [deleted]
  - andrepd 28d ago
    > "I deeply apologize for this extremely poor choice of words, it is the opposite of what I was trying to convey." The AI-isms are seeping into their speech :)
- colinhb 28d ago
  May be unfairly jaded or just well calibrated given the body of evidence, but I can't help but think of another quote about OpenAI leadership: > Not consistently candid
  - Laurel1234 28d ago
    [dead]
- peri-cl 28d ago
  > "When we learned that they had Euler but not Navier-Stokes, we offered to let them go first, to suggest that they should be the ones to get the prize, and optionally for Tristan to be the lead author on a rewrite of the OpenAI proof. We felt it was challenging to offer the same to Levent (an Anthropic employee), who was not willing to talk or coordinate with us anyway. We were open to other solutions." What an admission! "We tried to defraud Alpöge out of sharing the Millenium Prize (that we don't dispute he might actually deserve), for no other reason than he works for our competitor and that inconveniences us". I thought Tristan Buckmaster's allegations sounded fantastic; and then 'sama just came out (tweet's ~30 minutes old) and admitted to all of them. Wow!
  - dandanua 28d ago
    Can't wait for the moment when AGI realizes how stupid and dishonest its owners are.
    - aeve890 28d ago
      Wait, people now want AGI to be sentient too?
  - fc417fc802 28d ago
    That isn't what the quoted passage says though? The claim by openai (no idea if true) is that they offered to wait for the other two to claim the prize before publishing their own work. Separately, they also offered to let one of the pair (but not the other) become an author on their own separate work.
- mrbungie 28d ago
  In what world a tweet and a screenshot of a private convo are evidence of good faith? Plain sociopathic behavior.
CobrastanJorji 28d ago
As soon as I thought "man, this sounds like some evil sociopath shit," my second thought was "oh, Sam Altman must have been personally involved."
- morkalork 28d ago
  I can sort of picture Sam Altman screaming "I drink your milkshake" at some poor researcher who foolishly used chatgpt/codex to aid in their work now.
morleytj 27d ago
Talking like that and threatening an academic like that is crazy. I read the explanations Altman and the others posted and they completely skip over the whole "I don't have to be nice" style threats.

peri-cl 28d ago

(To help people keep track: that's OpenAI (allegedly) threatening Tristan Buckmaster (NYU) to remove Levent Alpöge as a co-author. Alpöge is a well-known[0] Anthropic mathematician). [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Alpöge https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Alpöge (also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49412947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49412947 the Hopf conjecture)

apical_dendrite 28d ago

Their own tweets are also pretty eyebrow-raising: > One option we discussed was that Tristan could be the lead author on a rewrite of OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes proof. It is in that context that I said “it would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee” because I felt it would be inappropriate for an Anthropic employee to author OpenAI’s work. Why would you offer another researcher the lead authorship on your groundbreaking paper if you thought you had developed it independently?

dgellow 28d ago
And why cannot they have someone associated with Anthropic as co-author? That’s not obvious at all. For sure they would prefer to be the only ones, but it’s pretty standard to have co-authors from different companies, even if they are technically competitors. What is inappropriate about it?
- dboreham 28d ago
  It's inappropriate if you're a sociopath.
- egillie 28d ago
  in another world this could have been a beautiful collaboration
- xdavidliu 28d ago
  because it severely dilutes the PR value.
- orangecat 28d ago
  If writing up the paper would involve using OpenAI's unreleased model, neither OpenAI nor Anthropic would be happy about Alpöge having that access.
- xdavidliu 28d ago
  would edit my comment but it's been a few hours > but it’s pretty standard to have co-authors from different companies that's only true for papers that are not millenium problem solutions

charm137 28d ago

It's astounding that the thought to dissociate one of the mathematicians from the proposed publication was driven by their corporate institutional affiliation - and that that exclusion was suggested by a scientist themselves! This is like a researcher from CMU saying to an NYU researcher that their collaborator, being from MIT, is a problem - this is as ridiculous as that! Progress in humanity's knowledge now has to play second fiddle to narrow corporate interests as IPO timings near (both of which wouldn't exist anyway if generations of mathematicians hadn't paved the way for AIs to become as good as they have).

curt15 28d ago
The scientist allegedly making that request comes from a machine learning background. Perhaps he's not familiar with the culture in mathematics regarding authorship. That sort of squabbling over author priority would be unconscionable to mathematicians.
- tensor 28d ago
  No, it's common to list authors alphabetically in a lot of computer science journals too.
- contubernio 28d ago
  Bubeck is familiar with how publishing works in mathematics.

hkmaxpro 28d ago

Both Sam Altman and Sebastien Bubeck admitted they only want Buckmaster to be the lead author on a rewrite of the OpenAI proof. https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140 https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310 A wake up call for using OpenAI models. If you discover something with their model and you work for a competitor, they “felt it would be inappropriate” for you “to author OpenAI’s work”.

igleria 28d ago
If I was a company with a zero data retention contract involving OAI I would be asking for a third party audit of such claim of zero retention like, yesterday.
- linkregister 28d ago
  Is there an implication of violation of ZDR here? Not a challenge. Just a request for clarification.
  - dakolli 28d ago
    By the way, the company that made it's entire product off of stealing all data it could get it's hand on while violating copyright and pirating, is not all of a sudden going to respect your data. If you think OpenAI or any major AI lab is going to give you true ZDR, I have a bridge to sell you.
    - fc417fc802 28d ago
      So use bedrock or vertex or whatever. Those are the ZDR offerings. Or was it your intention to insinuate that the major cloud providers are conspiring with openai to violate their contractual obligations to their customers?
      - dakolli 28d ago

olalonde 28d ago

Playing the devil's advocate here but it's true that OpenAI didn't have to make those offers.

20k 28d ago
They kind of did though, they were hoping to keep the fact that they may well have plagiarised these researchers unpublished work quiet. They did not want this to turn into a scandal about the fact that they appear to be training on prompts without consent It makes a certain amount of sense. The internet data is too polluted with AI usage now to be useful, so the only AI free new data source is the prompts people feed into ChatGPT. The only problem is that its clearly plagiarism Edit: OpenAI have admitted to training on prompts at the time the breakthrough was made: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117236471352470303 https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/11723647135247030...
- za_creature 28d ago
  > the only AI free new data source is the prompts hmmmmmmmmmm
- olalonde 28d ago
  OpenAI claims the data contamination issue only surfaced after they proactively reached out to Buckmaster and Alpöge to coordinate a joint release. They also say that even if there was some contamination, the underlying proofs diverge substantially: > Our effort began on September 1st after hearing a rumor which we later realized was related to Levent Alpöge, an Anthropic employee, and Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at NYU. After the completion of our full project and Lean verification (on September 6th), believing from the rumor they also had a solution of Navier–Stokes, we reached out to them to offer a concurrent release of our result and to recognize their priority in a joint announcement. At that point we found out that they had a resolution of the forced Euler problem. In these discussions we offered them visibility into all of the prompts we used and later to see the proof. We recognize the priority of their work on forced Euler and congratulate them on their remarkable mathematical achievement.