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OpenAI has a lot of explaining to do here. The “least worst” representation of the course of events is that their researchers are just jerks, and not behaving

by cmiles8 18d ago

OpenAI has a lot of explaining to do here. The “least worst” representation of the course of events is that their researchers are just jerks, and not behaving in a manner that’s considered acceptable in the research community. Other alleged scenarios just go downhill from there.

jdm2212 18d ago
It is worth actually reading OpenAI's response, which is basically that they were trying to see if their models could do what Anthropic had already done, and were surprised to discover that (a) Anthropic had not done it at all, and (b) in fact no one else had done it yet. And then they didn't want to give an Anthropic employee coauthor credit for work that OpenAI had done, which idk seems pretty fair?
- deleted 18d ago
  [deleted]
- johnnyApplePRNG 18d ago
  >were surprised to discover that (a) Anthropic had not done it at all They were surprised another competitor had not wastefully thrown $20 million+ worth of compute at a problem they had no business solving in the first place? That's reaching, imho.
  - jdm2212 18d ago
    Why shouldn't they advance math research and test the limits of their models?
  - gorgolo 18d ago
    Why is it wasteful to solve one of the most famous problems in modern mathematics? And why would one particular company have no business solving it in the first place?
    - johnnyApplePRNG 18d ago
      They brute forced it, that proves they had no business solving it. They didn't know what they were doing and they pumped a bunch more carbon into our atmosphere because hubris basically. Shame on them.
      - babelfish 18d ago
        Every sentence in this comment is incorrect
        johnnyApplePRNG 17d ago
        This article proves otherwise https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/8/on-navier-stokes/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/8/on-navier-stokes/
    - woopsn 18d ago
      I guess by their own account they were doing competitive analysis on the product and incidentally solved NS. Probably the two companies should agree to benchmark on random diophantine systems, which are harder and more applicable anyway. It wasn't "brute force" but they did spend $10-20M over the course of a few days based on a rumor, which is ... something. The fact they're not actually taking credit, and published no insights other than "it's a vortex" shows the company really has no business in mathematics. They're not interested (the guy said as much) and it obviously won't pay the bill - rather, they were able to pre-empt an announcement they thought Anthropic may have been preparing to make.
- cmiles8 18d ago
  Their explanation doesn’t help much and there are a few things working against them: 1. This is not the first time they have done these “hey guys check out this breakthrough!” announcements where others quickly came along and say “hey, not so fast.” (Eg Erdos) So, specifically in maths their reputation is not good. 2. They’re blurring the lines between commercial cutthroat developments and the gentlemen’s code of sorts re what’s acceptable in academic research. They were working from material non-public insights into other research, which is why they even tried to poke at this in the way they did. Doing that without collaborating first was a pretty jerk move no mater how you slice it. 3. There’s still lots of open questions about how novel the solution was and the timing here where this “test” only happened after other researchers say they fed OpenAI models at least part of the solution is a little too convenient to gloss over. OpenAI statements here to date on the matter have been rather fuzzy. All that combined with OpenAI’s less than stellar reputation on ethics is why folks are reacting the way they are right now.
  - jdm2212 18d ago
    RE item 2 -- in lab science, it is entirely normal to have competitive-verging-on-adversarial relationships between labs racing to get results first. Mathematicians apparently need to get used to the idea that math is a lab science now. And that is a good thing! Competition moves us forward much faster than sitting on results to avoid hurting someone's feelings.
    - cmiles8 18d ago
      I don’t think this is the same thing. Legit competition is of course good. But taking what was arguably a leak and then using that divert massive sums of compute (not available to the other researchers that were using their systems) to then get ahead is where it gets ethically dubious.
      - jdm2212 18d ago
        Levent Alpoge is an Anthropic employee with access to Anthropic compute who routinely throws that at problems and then posts the results on Twitter. They thought they were competing with him! And they in fact were. It's just that in this case he supposedly was acting in a personal capacity, even though he was using internal Anthropic models for some of the work.

by cmiles8 18d ago

jdm2212 18d ago

It is worth actually reading OpenAI's response, which is basically that they were trying to see if their models could do what Anthropic had already done, and were surprised to discover that (a) Anthropic had not done it at all, and (b) in fact no one else had done it yet. And then they didn't want to give an Anthropic employee coauthor credit for work that OpenAI had done, which idk seems pretty fair?

deleted 18d ago
[deleted]
johnnyApplePRNG 18d ago
>were surprised to discover that (a) Anthropic had not done it at all They were surprised another competitor had not wastefully thrown $20 million+ worth of compute at a problem they had no business solving in the first place? That's reaching, imho.
- jdm2212 18d ago
  Why shouldn't they advance math research and test the limits of their models?
- gorgolo 18d ago
  Why is it wasteful to solve one of the most famous problems in modern mathematics? And why would one particular company have no business solving it in the first place?
  - johnnyApplePRNG 18d ago
    They brute forced it, that proves they had no business solving it. They didn't know what they were doing and they pumped a bunch more carbon into our atmosphere because hubris basically. Shame on them.
    - babelfish 18d ago
      Every sentence in this comment is incorrect
      - johnnyApplePRNG 17d ago
        This article proves otherwise https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/8/on-navier-stokes/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/8/on-navier-stokes/
  - woopsn 18d ago
    I guess by their own account they were doing competitive analysis on the product and incidentally solved NS. Probably the two companies should agree to benchmark on random diophantine systems, which are harder and more applicable anyway. It wasn't "brute force" but they did spend $10-20M over the course of a few days based on a rumor, which is ... something. The fact they're not actually taking credit, and published no insights other than "it's a vortex" shows the company really has no business in mathematics. They're not interested (the guy said as much) and it obviously won't pay the bill - rather, they were able to pre-empt an announcement they thought Anthropic may have been preparing to make.
cmiles8 18d ago
Their explanation doesn’t help much and there are a few things working against them: 1. This is not the first time they have done these “hey guys check out this breakthrough!” announcements where others quickly came along and say “hey, not so fast.” (Eg Erdos) So, specifically in maths their reputation is not good. 2. They’re blurring the lines between commercial cutthroat developments and the gentlemen’s code of sorts re what’s acceptable in academic research. They were working from material non-public insights into other research, which is why they even tried to poke at this in the way they did. Doing that without collaborating first was a pretty jerk move no mater how you slice it. 3. There’s still lots of open questions about how novel the solution was and the timing here where this “test” only happened after other researchers say they fed OpenAI models at least part of the solution is a little too convenient to gloss over. OpenAI statements here to date on the matter have been rather fuzzy. All that combined with OpenAI’s less than stellar reputation on ethics is why folks are reacting the way they are right now.
- jdm2212 18d ago
  RE item 2 -- in lab science, it is entirely normal to have competitive-verging-on-adversarial relationships between labs racing to get results first. Mathematicians apparently need to get used to the idea that math is a lab science now. And that is a good thing! Competition moves us forward much faster than sitting on results to avoid hurting someone's feelings.
  - cmiles8 18d ago
    I don’t think this is the same thing. Legit competition is of course good. But taking what was arguably a leak and then using that divert massive sums of compute (not available to the other researchers that were using their systems) to then get ahead is where it gets ethically dubious.
    - jdm2212 18d ago
      Levent Alpoge is an Anthropic employee with access to Anthropic compute who routinely throws that at problems and then posts the results on Twitter. They thought they were competing with him! And they in fact were. It's just that in this case he supposedly was acting in a personal capacity, even though he was using internal Anthropic models for some of the work.