5 ms·

I neither agree nor disagree that all LLM outputs are plagiarism. I merely objected that the line of argument engaged in was specious given the context. As to

I neither agree nor disagree that all LLM outputs are plagiarism. I merely objected that the line of argument engaged in was specious given the context. As to your stronger argument. You only cite prior novel insights that you're actively building off of and that (approximately speaking) fall outside of the status quo. You don't for example cite leibniz or newton despite your paper making heavy use of calculus. So is there any actual evidence that openai trained on the data in question? And further, did the openai proof directly build on someone else's novel insights as opposed to deriving everything from scratch? (I don't pretend to know but the vast majority of what I've seen so far in the comments here is what I'd characterize as brain-dead screeching. Certainly not the level of discussion I come to HN for.) Separately, consider the implications of what you're arguing for there. Suppose your horse in a space suit picture were somehow valuable to society. Suppose that due to shortcomings of your tool you lacked the ability to readily and accurately identify the originators of the relevant concepts. Should you refrain from publishing this useful work due to the lack of citations? How are you supposed to handle this situation? Remember that in this analogy everyone throughout society is on the same page that your tool consistently recycles other people's ideas while being technically incapable of producing reliable citations. The question is a simple trolley-esque problem - do you publish without proper citations for everyone's benefit and if so what are you supposed to say?

za_creature 28d ago
I am not engaging further. You asked for meaningful refutation of your observation, I provided one. Academia has stricter rules than regular society.
cerwisc 28d ago
The chats the professor had are not generic knowledge. And yes of course you still need to cite Newton and Leibniz depending on what result you want to mention. What’s allowed to be not cited are not status quo, the term you’re looking for is “folklore” results aka results that have been around so long that 1) nobody knows who came up with them or 2) everyone knows who came up with them. The second point: if you say you can’t prove that OpenAI actually used it, it doesn’t mean that OpenAI did not use it. It’s hacker news not lawyers news here lol. And OpenAI can’t prove that they didn’t use it either. The whole point is that Levent felt he had reasonable suspicion to believe the AI did use the result, because he felt like without his input on an unpublished paper it was unlikely for AI to reach the same result. I haven’t read the paper so I don’t know where I stand on that. On the last point, about your “for the greater good” argument. It’s higher maths lol. I don’t know about this field but I doubt it’ll be very useful for society. Maybe it’ll make one part 2x faster which makes some rocket cheaper to launch. Does the average person care? Debatable. I think it’s reasonable to hold published papers in proof based fields to a higher standard. Otherwise the current & future problems of ML engineer fields just expand to other fields. No thanks. Finally, if you anonpost to the autistic Internet forum that everyone else is “brain dead screeching”, it really just says something about yourself lol.
- visarga 28d ago
  Even if AI used the result, AI pushed it to the finish line while Levent and Tristan did not. But I understand the approach was different, the information leak was only that it was "doable".
  - cerwisc 28d ago
    The approach was the same.
lukewarm707 28d ago
evidence that openai trained on the data: they would have denied it if they didn't train on it. did the proof build on the insights: the influence of an individual text in the training data is deeply weighted by quality, relevance, etc. a high quality proof in advanced mathematics written by a codex user is going to get boosted to the max. the model is post-trained on prompt material. that is again going to boost it. the prompt will boost this material specifically. perhaps they even rammed dense maths in particular into the model in post training. anecdotally i have been able to get near-verbatim copies of original material out of models at inference. the type of work that buckmaster and alpoge fed into openai feels like the exact type of concept that would cause an "aha!" or "but what if?" in chain of thought. in fact i would bet that their work is in the logs. the likes of astra and fable are thought to be up to 10T parameters in size. i consider it highly plausible that a semantic representation of the euler proof could be pulled out of the model weights in good shape.

za_creature 28d ago

I am not engaging further. You asked for meaningful refutation of your observation, I provided one. Academia has stricter rules than regular society.

cerwisc 28d ago

The chats the professor had are not generic knowledge. And yes of course you still need to cite Newton and Leibniz depending on what result you want to mention. What’s allowed to be not cited are not status quo, the term you’re looking for is “folklore” results aka results that have been around so long that 1) nobody knows who came up with them or 2) everyone knows who came up with them. The second point: if you say you can’t prove that OpenAI actually used it, it doesn’t mean that OpenAI did not use it. It’s hacker news not lawyers news here lol. And OpenAI can’t prove that they didn’t use it either. The whole point is that Levent felt he had reasonable suspicion to believe the AI did use the result, because he felt like without his input on an unpublished paper it was unlikely for AI to reach the same result. I haven’t read the paper so I don’t know where I stand on that. On the last point, about your “for the greater good” argument. It’s higher maths lol. I don’t know about this field but I doubt it’ll be very useful for society. Maybe it’ll make one part 2x faster which makes some rocket cheaper to launch. Does the average person care? Debatable. I think it’s reasonable to hold published papers in proof based fields to a higher standard. Otherwise the current & future problems of ML engineer fields just expand to other fields. No thanks. Finally, if you anonpost to the autistic Internet forum that everyone else is “brain dead screeching”, it really just says something about yourself lol.

visarga 28d ago
Even if AI used the result, AI pushed it to the finish line while Levent and Tristan did not. But I understand the approach was different, the information leak was only that it was "doable".
- cerwisc 28d ago
  The approach was the same.

lukewarm707 28d ago

evidence that openai trained on the data: they would have denied it if they didn't train on it. did the proof build on the insights: the influence of an individual text in the training data is deeply weighted by quality, relevance, etc. a high quality proof in advanced mathematics written by a codex user is going to get boosted to the max. the model is post-trained on prompt material. that is again going to boost it. the prompt will boost this material specifically. perhaps they even rammed dense maths in particular into the model in post training. anecdotally i have been able to get near-verbatim copies of original material out of models at inference. the type of work that buckmaster and alpoge fed into openai feels like the exact type of concept that would cause an "aha!" or "but what if?" in chain of thought. in fact i would bet that their work is in the logs. the likes of astra and fable are thought to be up to 10T parameters in size. i consider it highly plausible that a semantic representation of the euler proof could be pulled out of the model weights in good shape.