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In OpenAI's case, if they were genuinely unsure, they wouldn't have said anything. "We cannot rule out" means they absolutely 100% for-sure did look at the exis

In OpenAI's case, if they were genuinely unsure, they wouldn't have said anything. "We cannot rule out" means they absolutely 100% for-sure did look at the existing prompts and bootstrapped from that, and they are trying to get ahead of the disclosure with this weasel-wording.

tedsanders 18d ago
Also possible: we're 99.999% sure, but a lawyer said to be safe and strictly accurate, we should stick in a sentence in saying we can't be perfectly sure, since it's infeasible for us to prove it. I promise you that if we took their work from ChatGPT and stuck in a bunch of weasel words to give the opposite impression while remaining technically true, I would quit on the spot. (I work at OpenAI.)
- sensanaty 18d ago
  Nice damage control bud, too bad the veil's lifting and everyone's seeing what you sociopaths at OpenAI are really like
  - cman1444 17d ago
    Where did the veil lift? This feels like a witch-hunt to me.
- lambda 17d ago
  While you can't necessarily prove it, you can say whether the data was in the training set at all. You can also do something like a release of a GPT-OSS v2, where you actually release training data and checkpoints, and do an experiment where you have some held out math problem dataset, then demonstrate how much training it takes on solutions (or partial solutions) to that dataset before the model saturates that test. While of course that would be a test on a much smaller model, it would cost a tiny fraction of the training on your big model, and it could be used to demonstrate just how much effect data contaminaiton like this could have, especially if you did the same experiment on a few different sized of model to show the scaling laws involved.
  - tedsanders 16d ago
    Yep. We looked into it and can confirm it was impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training. If prompts were submitted earlier than that and training was not opted out, there's a chance they made their way into our training pipeline in some form. But this would be a droplet in an ocean and unlikely to have made any difference, imo. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/science/tristan-buckmaster-openai-math-navier-stokes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/science/tristan-buckmaste...
    - lambda 13d ago
      Thanks for the follow up, I do appreciate it.

tedsanders 18d ago

Also possible: we're 99.999% sure, but a lawyer said to be safe and strictly accurate, we should stick in a sentence in saying we can't be perfectly sure, since it's infeasible for us to prove it. I promise you that if we took their work from ChatGPT and stuck in a bunch of weasel words to give the opposite impression while remaining technically true, I would quit on the spot. (I work at OpenAI.)

sensanaty 18d ago
Nice damage control bud, too bad the veil's lifting and everyone's seeing what you sociopaths at OpenAI are really like
- cman1444 17d ago
  Where did the veil lift? This feels like a witch-hunt to me.
lambda 17d ago
While you can't necessarily prove it, you can say whether the data was in the training set at all. You can also do something like a release of a GPT-OSS v2, where you actually release training data and checkpoints, and do an experiment where you have some held out math problem dataset, then demonstrate how much training it takes on solutions (or partial solutions) to that dataset before the model saturates that test. While of course that would be a test on a much smaller model, it would cost a tiny fraction of the training on your big model, and it could be used to demonstrate just how much effect data contaminaiton like this could have, especially if you did the same experiment on a few different sized of model to show the scaling laws involved.
- tedsanders 16d ago
  Yep. We looked into it and can confirm it was impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training. If prompts were submitted earlier than that and training was not opted out, there's a chance they made their way into our training pipeline in some form. But this would be a droplet in an ocean and unlikely to have made any difference, imo. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/science/tristan-buckmaster-openai-math-navier-stokes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/science/tristan-buckmaste...
  - lambda 13d ago
    Thanks for the follow up, I do appreciate it.