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I'm confused, your employer very directly stated that they are unable to confirm that the model was not trained on the conversations.

tristanj 25d ago
The models are trained on the conversations of hundreds of millions of people. ChatGPT has several billion conversations every day. I estimate that the model that solved Navier–Stokes was trained on data from nearly a trillion conversations. It's unknowable and not possible to prove if any one specific conversation was the key to solving Navier–Stokes.
- DetroitThrow 24d ago
  >It's unknowable and not possible to prove if any one specific conversation was the key to solving Navier–Stokes. If the conversation was in the training set, there's a high likelihood that the small set of conversations related to solving Navier-Stokes was used by the model. I get Astra to still quote some of my friends' books or blogposts nearly verbatim on certain niche issues. Much more importantly, we _can_ determine whether a conversation was used in the training data. And if it was, it gives us a great idea whether that logic was captured in reasoning for a novel problem never yet solved. Given that you don't see any of this as below the belt according to your other comments, maybe your contribution here is more for yourself than a fair conversation about attribution.
  - tristanj 24d ago
    The flaw with this line of reasoning is that Buckmaster and Alpöge only had a partially completed proof of a weaker version of the Navier-Stokes problem. OpenAI's internal model solved the full, harder problem. This means the key information needed to bridge the gap was not present in Buckmaster and Alpöge's chat history. You might retort that ChatGPT used the training data to copy their approach, but the approach Buckmaster and Alpöge chose was already published by Luis and Diego in 2023 and in every frontier model's training set.
    - whimsicalism 24d ago
      This argument proves too much. By this standard, it wouldn't have counted as copying their approach if the researchers had just fed in Levent & Buckmaster's paper verbatim as a prompt into the swarm.
      - DetroitThrow 24d ago
        I don't think the person describing the paper by Buckmaster as the same as the 2023 paper by Córdoba and Martínez-Zoroa is really discussing this in good faith fwiw. There are some massive advancements within it and if the person was participating wasn't just regurgitating something to "win the argument" in their eyes, they wouldn't describe it that way.
    - tomcorrigan 24d ago
      I’m pretty sure you think you are doing a good job of defending your employer and you probably believe “Open”AI are the good guys here. I also acknowledge that they butter your bread so your financial future currently depends on their success. However the way you are conducting yourself in public, while announcing yourself as an OpenAI employee is doing enormous harm to the greater and magnanimous aim of your organisation. Take a step back and read the temperature of the room. Being the smartest guy in the room will never protect you from alienating the rest of the room into a baying mob. Right now you are Icarus flying straight into the sun.
      - tristanj 24d ago
        I'm not an OAI employee and never pretended to be one are you high?
      - senordevnyc 24d ago
        You’re confusing usernames, which is pretty ironic given your nasty comment.
    - hellohello2 24d ago
      I don't believe people are denying that the model is impressive. The problem is that learning someone else is making progress on a topic using method X and then rushing to scoop them borders on academic misconduct. If, on top of this, their private conversations about X were used in the proof, I really don't see how its defensible...
- Pulcinella 24d ago
  Do you not log the training data? Seems like you should be able to just check what was in the training data. To not keep track is just sloppy work and certainly unprofessional science.
  - tristanj 24d ago
    The burden of proof is on Buckmaster and Alpöge to reveal if they had the "Improve the model for everyone" setting enabled or disabled. OpenAI shouldn't be expected to reveal private user configuration data. You're asking them to perform a user privacy violation.
    - whimsicalism 24d ago
      If the reason that OpenAI is unable to state whether they trained on this data is because they (as policy) do not reveal whether a given member has turned on/off the "Improve the model for everyone" setting, they can at least say so. FWIW, publicly facing OAI docs are very unclear about whether this setting even applies to Codex conversations.
      - tristanj 24d ago
        An OpenAI employee did say so: https://x.com/tszzl/status/2097393423808377173 https://x.com/tszzl/status/2097393423808377173 it is exceptionally unlikely that anything they ever did made it into any part of training, and the chances are zero if they have opted out (likely). it would be a terrible precedent to break the the PII-scrubbing boundary to go and round it down to 0, and we won’t do it
        amazingman 24d ago
        And we all know how good OpenAI is at containing models during training...
        unsupp0rted 24d ago
- fwip 24d ago
  The IP laundering machine strikes again.
- whimsicalism 24d ago
  I agree that it is not possible to prove if any one specific conversation (or derived RL tasks) was key to solving Navier-Stokes (at least without massive resource expenditure). I don't really understand how the quantity of training data/rollouts used in training is relevant to the question of whether or not it was trained on these conversations. I also don't really believe that whether or not this model was trained on these conversations is unknowable information.
  - tristanj 24d ago
    [dead]
- hellohello2 24d ago
  Sorry but this is a misconception: these models are both capable of complete novelty and of plagiarism. For a concrete example, image diffusion models have been shown to reproduce many existing images nearly 100% exactly, yet clearly, they can also create new ones. A model being trained on lots of irrelevant information does not mean relevant information was not used.
- WD-42 24d ago
  > ChatGPT has several billion conversations every day. I estimate that the model that solved Navier–Stokes was trained on data from nearly a trillion conversations. How many of those trillion conversations were about Navier-Stokes you reckon?
tedsanders 23d ago
We looked into it further 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...

tristanj 25d ago

The models are trained on the conversations of hundreds of millions of people. ChatGPT has several billion conversations every day. I estimate that the model that solved Navier–Stokes was trained on data from nearly a trillion conversations. It's unknowable and not possible to prove if any one specific conversation was the key to solving Navier–Stokes.

DetroitThrow 24d ago
>It's unknowable and not possible to prove if any one specific conversation was the key to solving Navier–Stokes. If the conversation was in the training set, there's a high likelihood that the small set of conversations related to solving Navier-Stokes was used by the model. I get Astra to still quote some of my friends' books or blogposts nearly verbatim on certain niche issues. Much more importantly, we _can_ determine whether a conversation was used in the training data. And if it was, it gives us a great idea whether that logic was captured in reasoning for a novel problem never yet solved. Given that you don't see any of this as below the belt according to your other comments, maybe your contribution here is more for yourself than a fair conversation about attribution.
- tristanj 24d ago
  The flaw with this line of reasoning is that Buckmaster and Alpöge only had a partially completed proof of a weaker version of the Navier-Stokes problem. OpenAI's internal model solved the full, harder problem. This means the key information needed to bridge the gap was not present in Buckmaster and Alpöge's chat history. You might retort that ChatGPT used the training data to copy their approach, but the approach Buckmaster and Alpöge chose was already published by Luis and Diego in 2023 and in every frontier model's training set.
  - whimsicalism 24d ago
    This argument proves too much. By this standard, it wouldn't have counted as copying their approach if the researchers had just fed in Levent & Buckmaster's paper verbatim as a prompt into the swarm.
    - DetroitThrow 24d ago
      I don't think the person describing the paper by Buckmaster as the same as the 2023 paper by Córdoba and Martínez-Zoroa is really discussing this in good faith fwiw. There are some massive advancements within it and if the person was participating wasn't just regurgitating something to "win the argument" in their eyes, they wouldn't describe it that way.
  - tomcorrigan 24d ago
    I’m pretty sure you think you are doing a good job of defending your employer and you probably believe “Open”AI are the good guys here. I also acknowledge that they butter your bread so your financial future currently depends on their success. However the way you are conducting yourself in public, while announcing yourself as an OpenAI employee is doing enormous harm to the greater and magnanimous aim of your organisation. Take a step back and read the temperature of the room. Being the smartest guy in the room will never protect you from alienating the rest of the room into a baying mob. Right now you are Icarus flying straight into the sun.
    - tristanj 24d ago
      I'm not an OAI employee and never pretended to be one are you high?
    - senordevnyc 24d ago
      You’re confusing usernames, which is pretty ironic given your nasty comment.
  - hellohello2 24d ago
    I don't believe people are denying that the model is impressive. The problem is that learning someone else is making progress on a topic using method X and then rushing to scoop them borders on academic misconduct. If, on top of this, their private conversations about X were used in the proof, I really don't see how its defensible...
Pulcinella 24d ago
Do you not log the training data? Seems like you should be able to just check what was in the training data. To not keep track is just sloppy work and certainly unprofessional science.
- tristanj 24d ago
  The burden of proof is on Buckmaster and Alpöge to reveal if they had the "Improve the model for everyone" setting enabled or disabled. OpenAI shouldn't be expected to reveal private user configuration data. You're asking them to perform a user privacy violation.
  - whimsicalism 24d ago
    If the reason that OpenAI is unable to state whether they trained on this data is because they (as policy) do not reveal whether a given member has turned on/off the "Improve the model for everyone" setting, they can at least say so. FWIW, publicly facing OAI docs are very unclear about whether this setting even applies to Codex conversations.
    - tristanj 24d ago
      An OpenAI employee did say so: https://x.com/tszzl/status/2097393423808377173 https://x.com/tszzl/status/2097393423808377173 it is exceptionally unlikely that anything they ever did made it into any part of training, and the chances are zero if they have opted out (likely). it would be a terrible precedent to break the the PII-scrubbing boundary to go and round it down to 0, and we won’t do it
      - amazingman 24d ago
        And we all know how good OpenAI is at containing models during training...
        unsupp0rted 24d ago
fwip 24d ago
The IP laundering machine strikes again.
whimsicalism 24d ago
I agree that it is not possible to prove if any one specific conversation (or derived RL tasks) was key to solving Navier-Stokes (at least without massive resource expenditure). I don't really understand how the quantity of training data/rollouts used in training is relevant to the question of whether or not it was trained on these conversations. I also don't really believe that whether or not this model was trained on these conversations is unknowable information.
- tristanj 24d ago
  [dead]
hellohello2 24d ago
Sorry but this is a misconception: these models are both capable of complete novelty and of plagiarism. For a concrete example, image diffusion models have been shown to reproduce many existing images nearly 100% exactly, yet clearly, they can also create new ones. A model being trained on lots of irrelevant information does not mean relevant information was not used.
WD-42 24d ago
> ChatGPT has several billion conversations every day. I estimate that the model that solved Navier–Stokes was trained on data from nearly a trillion conversations. How many of those trillion conversations were about Navier-Stokes you reckon?

tedsanders 23d ago

We looked into it further 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...