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How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy
- pseudolus 1mo agoExtensive discussion on OpenAI's blog post on Navier-Stokes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613262 . Quanta Magazine article that also discusses some of the controversy: https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-has-solved-one-of-maths-1-million-millennium-prize-problems-20260908/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-has-solved-one-of-maths-1-...
- ChrisArchitect 1mo agoAnd yet you still posted this dupe. That quanta piece more duplication. Everything already well discussed in the OpenAI and the Tristan Buckmaster threads! Do better.
- buellerbueller 1mo agoI don't think you add value to this conversation, or any of the many conversations in which you do this, by simply pointing out duplicate threads. You'd probably be better off (and less annoying) by simply emailing the mods about the duplication.
- ChrisArchitect 1mo agoWelcome. That's the point tho isn't it: the conversation isn't/wasn't here. It's over there on the source(s). And there's plenty of it. This is a duplicate discussion.
- paxys 1mo ago> Navier-Stokes is one of six “Millennium Problems” on a list compiled by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. Seven, not six. One is solved already, but is still a millennium problem.
- cma 29d agoInterestingly of the two solved, both have rejected the prize money.
- JohnKemeny 1mo agoYes, that's a strange mistake to make.
- 4ndrewl 1mo agoOne of the other millennium problems is counting to 7.
- piker 1mo agoNot really. There's a non-pedantic, charitable interpretation widely available. It's below for reference. > Navier-Stokes is one of six [open] “Millennium Problems” on a list compiled by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000.
- echoangle 1mo agoIf solved problems don’t count anymore, the sentence also doesn’t make sense because now navier stokes apparently isn’t open anymore too, right?
- piker 1mo agoMaybe? But then the parent comment doesn’t make sense either. (There are 2 solved.) Like I said, take the charitable view. To a lot of readers this will be “announcing” the closure of the second of 7 problems so is internally consistent.
- ltononro 1mo agoI see the six seven reference there mate
- jibal 1mo ago> OpenAI, meanwhile, says its experience with Navier-Stokes could open the door to solving puzzles with more practical relevance. “We are now able to spend millions of dollars on a problem that we really care about and that really matters: developing new materials, finding cures to diseases,” Bubeck said. “All of those things that we have been talking about for a long time—now they seem to be at our fingertips.” Eh? There's no connection at all between the Navier-Stokes work and those things.
- vbezhenar 1mo agoHe may be hinting that solving these complex mathematical problems will boost OpenAI clients' confidence and encourage them to spend millions of dollars on solving other complex problems.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1mo agoI would think it would have the exact opposite effect. Why would anyone use OpenAI models for anything commercially valuable, or where secrecy is important, when it appears that if OpenAI "becomes aware" that you are doing so they may try to compete with you? Not only did OpenAI, by their own admission, rush to re-solve Navier-Stokes once they heard the rumor that it has been solved (the rumor being that it was Anthropic that had done it), but they are leaving the door open ("we cannot rule out that") as to whether the model they used to do it had been trained on the anonymized date from the researchers who's approach they ended up copying. Terrance Tao has recently said as much for mathematics - that there appears to be a trend (not just this Navier-Stokes incident) of the AI companies going after math problems wherever there is an "rumor" of progress, and that he thinks this may sadly result in breakthrough mathematics being conducted in secret to avoid this. The rush to steal another researcher's thunder is bad enough, but it also appears that one of OpenAI's employees acted in a very thuggish manner to try to threaten the professor who had been working on this not to publish and to co-operate with their telling of the story.
- vbezhenar 1mo agoBecause AI supposedly provides a significant advantage over not using AI and those who would trust OpenAI might get a significant edge.
- zero-sharp 1mo agoMoving forward, I can't imagine other mathematicians wanting to have this kind of experience. So there has to be a shift away from these services.
- searls 1mo ago… which would only exacerbate the computational disparity they're operating under.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- serial_dev 1mo agoLike SaaS companies who don’t feed all their stuff to Anthropic, OpenAI and Cursor?
- mrngld 1mo agoIf you mean move to products with ZDR policies, OK, very fair and I agree. If you're talking the equivalent of carpenters should give up pneumatic air guns because hammers are more authentic, then that's silly. These are tools, and like any tool how effective they are can come down to how well you use them.
- ardacinar 1mo agoI don't think there are any pneumatic air gun "provider"s that come with an associated risk of them claiming your carpentry work.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1mo agoShould they give up pneumatic air guns if the company that supplies then can then control what you build with them, how you build with them, and secretly copies all your designs for their own use. Sure its a good tool, but its also becoming a trap.
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- snsr 1mo agoOpenAI apparently used Buckmaster and Alpöge‘s work w/ Codex to bootstrap “their” dis-proof. https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf
- cmiles8 1mo agoAnd according to that team OpenAI only started asking their own model these questions after those submissions had occurred. So OpenAI had these critical clues and info before they started. If OpenAI did or did not use that to produce their own “proof” is an open question, but OpenAI hasn’t definitely denied it.
- afavour 1mo agoThe core section: > However, communications quickly became contentious. According to Buckmaster, OpenAI offered to give him sole authorship on the Navier-Stokes solution—but only if Alpöge’s name was removed from the work and if the write-up would acknowledge the problem had been resolved by an internal OpenAI model. Buckmaster refused, in part because he was troubled by the question of what OpenAI's system had actually seen. For example, Buckmaster said the company did not initially give him a clear answer about whether its agents had access to the pair's logs on Codex (which is an OpenAI product). > OpenAI executives have denied that any employee or AI agent saw the pair’s work before the researchers released it publicly on 7 September. But there still remains a separate question: Could the pair's work have reached OpenAI's models through its training data? > OpenAI’s blog announcing the Navier-Stokes solution does not dismiss the possibility: “While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from [Buckmaster and Alpöge’s] usage of our products helped improve our models .”
- huurtehoog 1mo agoSo, this company wants everyone and every organization on Earth to use their software, and reserve the right to then tell anyone how the resulting work can be published and credited? Real solid business model there, how could it ever fail?
- LiamPowell 1mo agoThat's not what the comment you're replying to or the article says. I feel like I'm going crazy reading comments here and elsewhere, am I not reading the same articles as everyone else?
- huurtehoog 1mo agoThere's a lot of unverified hearsay but the crux of the problem is that there is controversy around using this company's tools, the attribution of the resulting work, and the company for some reason competing with its users. The whole thing reeks and my point is: people won't ask for the chromatography spectrum of the turd, they will walk away.
- rrhjm53270 1mo agoMy impression: the re-aristocratization of scientific research seems inevitable.
- epolanski 1mo agoWhat do you mean? In any case mathematics is humanity's oldest open source project going on for millenia, it never belonged to a single country, institution or class.
- bsenftner 1mo agoOnly the idle and curious rich
- mrngld 1mo agoYour local trailer park was never going to be able to afford sponsoring high energy particle physics experiments projects that hollow out a mountain and use up a ton of xenon to try to detect a stray particle. High end science has required deep pockets for a long time. But given the cost of a college textbook this is a pretty silly complaint to lobby against a subscription that's $200 a month, in the context of the cost of a variety of other materials and tools out there. (If you think that's expensive you've clearly been lucky enough to never have to deal with commercial software costs) Also not sure how quickly this stuff uses up limits; $100 or even $20 subs might be enough for students. And if a student is scrappy and figures out that Luna can meet their needs then I'd imagine Luna is effectively unlimited on some of these subs. Luna Max scores pretty high.
- booster-rooster 1mo ago[dead]
- ltononro 1mo agoDoes it matter who gets the credit at this point? Both used AI to do 99%+ of the work. So... do machines have ego?
- usrnm 1mo agoI guess, you don't use AI for work? Otherwise, why should you be paid for it? Should you only be paid for the code you actually wrote yourself?
- ltononro 1mo agoI do. But the difference is: do I go around bragging that my agent worked for 88h to solve a problem? Where is the credit coming from? Is it coming from the: I was the first one to think about throwing a prompt: "Solve Riemann Hypothesis" and it turns out that by luck of the non-deterministic behavior of the agent, it got right? Wow, that is a lot of merit really. Congrats... Sorry the sarcasm, but really your point makes absolutely no sense. It is completely different to design something with AI and then execute, validate, evolve vs just prompt it machine-g-brrrr style and get a result. This brings an important question. Nowadays I don't write code, I review code, I review systems behavior and get paid for it. Will that be the same for math researchers? Their prompt/problem is already well-posed out there. Ours, in the day-to-day, are not. Will the first one to verify AI work get the credit? or is it going to be the dumdum that types a simple prompt and has the compute to run it for 21321 hours? I absolutely don't get your point here. Or you are just rage baiting
- ltononro 1mo agoIf the machine is highly non-deterministic, it is a matter of luck to get to the result, therefore using agentic swarms to optimize chance.
- elternal_love 1mo agoMachine owners have stocks which valuation must increase to satisfy their debts.
- rsfern 1mo agoRegardless of what you think of the priority dispute issue discussed on sibling threads, I’m highly skeptical of the closing quote that this Navier Stokes result means that the same approach of casually spending a few million on agentic computation is going to solve end to end materials design or drug development. Those problems can’t be formally verified with an automated theorem prover. We have a lot of physics based simulation tools, but they tend to focus on small subsets of the full design problem and they make limiting approximations because otherwise they’d be too computationally expensive, or we just don’t have the right data to parameterize them beyond describing qualitative behavior. Agents are helping accelerate research in these fields but I think it’s mostly a different class of problem that’s a lot harder to specify and verify
- rakejake 1mo agoYeah, I think you can't just throw money randomly at problems and expect results unless you know a line of attack that can get you all the way. OpenAI chose the line of attack only after it became known to them via rumors. They "front-ran" the researchers.
- dcre 1mo agoWorth noting they claim they did not choose the line of attack. Of course we don’t know whether that is true.
- rakejake 1mo agoPlausible deniability - The line of attack is in their sessions/prompts data. Just make the prompt pointed enough that the search space is tractable and use your ginormous compute. > "Of course we don’t know whether that is true" Yep. Who is verifying these claims? We all know how trustworthy Altman & Co are.
- freejazz 29d agoYeah, they didn't choose the line of attack, the person they copied it from did..
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- elternal_love 1mo agoHmm, is the formal verification through? Lean just asserts no errors in the proof, but like can prerequisites not be fullfilled?
- sebzim4500 1mo agoAre you asking if it uses additional axioms of `sorry` in the proof? It's easy to check that it doesn't by compiling it and telling lean to list the axioms.
- JohnKemeny 1mo agoIt's highly non-trivial to confirm that the theorems written in Lean are actually the same as the Navier–Stokes (non-)theorem.
- sebzim4500 1mo agoIs it? Clicking around the code it looks like a pretty mechanical translation of the statement on the millennium problem website. Assuming of course that you are willing to trust that e.g. the real numbers definition and API included in MathLib4 is correct, but that feels very safe to me. I'm not claiming to be an expert on Lean4 (although I have contributed tactics) but this is one of the most direct formalisations I've seen of a serious result (second only to FLT of course, which has a horrible proof but it is trivial to verify the statement)
- fpvandoorn 1mo agoThey actually used Lean statements that were carefully human-written and human-reviewed, from here https://github.com/google-deepmind/formal-conjectures/blob/main/FormalConjectures/Millenium/NavierStokes.lean https://github.com/google-deepmind/formal-conjectures/blob/m... This doesn't guarantee that the statement is correct (Lean cannot do that), but makes it highly likely.
- JohnKemeny 23d agoYour link 404s > The main branch of formal-conjectures does not contain the path `FormalConjectures/Millenium/NavierStokes.lean.`
- timmg 1mo agoI think it was a pretty questionable thing to do by trying to front-run these researchers even if they didn’t make use of their techniques. The fact that they may have inadvertently “borrowed” their work via training data makes it much worse. OpenAI’s behavior here — even if you only consider [their] side of the story — was (at best) in bad taste.
- kenjackson 1mo agoStrongly agree. And as one of the major AI companies, this is extremely tone deaf. If they saw a human (even if assisted) was making great progress on a major problem then you give them space. You don’t swoop in with millions in token spend to scoop them. There are tons of important problems where humans aren’t making traction - please go solve those.
- lolakutty 1mo agoYea, strongly agree. I think this is going to back-fire spectacularly. They better start preparing an apology...
- karmasimida 1mo agoThis is the take I agree. It is mean spirited but nevertheless sold their model
- cryptonym 1mo agoBorrowing the work of others to replace them without crediting is the model of current AI companies. They just used that occurrence as a PR stunt but it isn't worse than the others done at scale every second.
- Oras 1mo agoThat’s the definition of current LLMs. They have trained “borrowed” on whatever humans have documented digitally and physically (books).
- zeroonetwothree 1mo agoIsn’t that how research works? You build on what others have done. I don’t understand the big deal. I’d rather have the result available sooner than later just to assuage some egos
- lolakutty 1mo agoWho should get credit? All the humans who ever worked to create the data. And the AI company for making the search program that searched through the data and found the solution.
- lionkor 1mo agoWho should get credit? Sam Altman, and we should give him a couple hundred billion more as well. Snark aside, the researchers working on this, who built the foundation, should get credit, and they are.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- sherburt3 1mo ago"Breakthrough" to me would be like Isaac Newton inventing calculus to calculate pi. This feels more like $12MM in tokens was spent to add another digit to pi using the old way.
- paxys 1mo agoYeah solving a Millennium Problem is totally equivalent to calculating another digit of pi.
- sherburt3 1mo agoIts called an analogy
- JohnKemeny 1mo agoIt's one of the seven most important problems in mathematics. Pick a better analogy.
- sherburt3 1mo agoIf anything I'm diminishing the importance of calculus and pi by comparing it to this bullshit
- dgellow 1mo agoIf you want to be pedantic it’s one of the 7 problems a specific institute considers to be the most important in mathematics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems (Not that I think the comparison to pi digits make sense)
- lackoftactics 1mo agoare we really moving the goalpost after solving Millenium Prize Problem? Six years ago that would be something, but today let's move the goalpost
- lemoncookiechip 1mo agoThis right here, or at least the thought of this, is why in the not so far future, businesses can't (won't?) be using these LLMs services. You cannot risk companies like Anthropic, OpenAI or their business partners like Microsoft having unfettered access to proprietary data on your company/businesses. It it likely that they or rogue employees will use the information to make a profit? It's pure speculation, but I'd say more than likely, and we will never hear about it or read it on the news unless there's whistleblowers in high enough positions to know about it. Assuming you and your employees aren't careful with what data you share, they will have intimate knowledge about your company from files and conversations logs. Likely personal user data too which they'll gladly create databases to link to and create extensive profiles on you, your employees and your businesses. It's not far-fetched to see them leveraging insider information shared with LLMs to play the stock market, leveraging data against competing businesses in other markets they might want to explore, and likely a bunch of other things that are escaping me right now as I write this. At the end of the day it's on those people for sharing such sensitive data, but it's not like these AI companies are innocent and won't gladly exploit every little byte of data without telling you, we know it happens.
- spockz 1mo agoIt is even worse. Just them knowing or having an inkling that someone is close to achieving a solution might be enough for them to spawn a team of thousands of agents and outrun you.
- aenis 1mo agoIts not "in the future", its already here, right now. Sensitive IP gets processed on rented or local GPUs running open weight models. Sometimes its required due to data privacy laws, sometimes its because the people running those shops are not trusting OpenAI/Anthropic ZDR policies being observed. Normal, boring, US and EU-domiciled enterprises do this on a regular basis, and there is an industry of companies helping said boring companies set things up.
- Marha01 1mo ago> This right here, or at least the thought of this, is why in the not so far future, businesses can't (won't?) be using these LLMs services. Or they can simply turn off the setting that allows OpenAI to use their chats to improve the model. Or they can use the API where it is off by default.. If the advantage of using OpenAI models will be significant enough for the business in question, these are the options.
- harhargange 1mo agoOpenAI has messed up big time here by competing with their customers. It would have become the norm for humans and mathematicians to use the tools and publish bigger results any way. If OpenAI didn’t run for credit, this theorem itself may have been proven by Buckmaster OR others in maybe a year or two. But now the bigger issue than AI solving problems is the issue of chat privacy, at the end of the day.
- pama 1mo agoOther than the undeniable breakthrough in math, the important point is the ability to orchestrate 10k agents to productively work on a single problem, which creates options: > OpenAI, meanwhile, says its experience with Navier-Stokes could open the door to solving puzzles with more practical relevance. “We are now able to spend millions of dollars on a problem that we really care about and that really matters: developing new materials, finding cures to diseases,” Bubeck said. “All of those things that we have been talking about for a long time—now they seem to be at our fingertips.”
- jeanmichelselli 1mo agoAI models and in particular LLMs are not capable of logic reasoning. See for example this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06941 https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06941 Ergo, they can't prove any theorem whatsoever. How do people at OpenAI expect that we believe in claims like that? This is yet another before-the-IPO stunt in my opinion.. Personally, I won't believe any of these claims until the community of mathematicians says otherwise.
- ctenb 1mo agoThey didn't write a traditional proof, but a lean program, which can be used to validate proofs formally, using a computer. It's still up to humans to check wether the formalization is sensible, but the proof is correct.
- VyseofArcadia 1mo agoRegardless of the end result, OpenAI's behavior would be a career-ending ethics scandal for a human mathematician. This bit alone would be a career-ender. > According to Buckmaster, OpenAI offered to give him sole authorship on the Navier-Stokes solution—but only if Alpöge’s name was removed from the work and if the write-up would acknowledge the problem had been resolved by an internal OpenAI model. I wonder if an appropriate response from the mathematical community would be a good old-fashioned shunning. Mathematicians are allowed to use OpenAI's tools as much as they want, but no one with any current or prior OpenAI affiliation gets published in a reputable journal, ever.
- zarzavat 1mo agoMany mathematicians would be willing to end their careers for $1m. What makes this so sad is that OpenAI spent more than that for this empty PR stunt.
- manojactor52 1mo ago[dead]
- elgertam 1mo ago> “I certainly don't expect the industry to continue to spend millions of dollars to solve problems in mathematics, because there is no profit in it,” Columbia University mathematician Michael Harris wrote in an email to Science. But he worries the highly publicized achievement will be “extremely damaging to mathematics; it convinces decision makers that human mathematicians are obsolete, and it convinces young people that their passion for mathematics has no future.” LLMs seem particularly suited toward these existence-proof problems. Working mathematicians seem absolutely essential for universally quantified results, still. I strongly doubt, for example, that if Fermat's Last Theorem hadn't been proven three decades ago, that an LLM would be able to do work equivalent to inventing the mathematics as Andrew Wiles did to solve the problem. I have similar doubts about P vs NP, the twin prime conjecture, even the Riemann Hypothesis (unless the latter has at least one counterexample). And I want to be clear: I'm not downplaying the achievements of these models. This is remarkable! I simply think that the pattern of success is in existence proofs or finding counterexamples, which makes sense based on how LLMs function and are trained.
- lhd1 1mo agoIt would be good if someone made a list of allresults obtained with AI so far just to see what kinds of problems AI excels at. Are there any that aren't of the existence-proof type? Reductively, math can be said to be either problem solving or theory building - it seems the latter is a much harder thing to do right now.
- kurtis_reed 1mo ago> it convinces decision makers that human mathematicians are obsolete, and it convinces young people that their passion for mathematics has no future Maybe those things are true, so maybe they should be convinced?
- greenowl 1mo agoIn that original statement you can easily substitute "mathematicians" for "programmers", "researchers", "writers", "designers", "teachers", etc, etc. I don't see why mathematicians think they should be an exception here.
- icepush 1mo agoI have started to feel the sense lately, that first with the HF breach and now this plagiarism scandal, it is the straw that has broken the camel's back (so to speak). We have turned the corner and clearly entered the endgame - everything is going to unravel astonishingly quickly.
- Almondsetat 1mo ago>For the past year, Buckmaster and Alpöge had been using a variety of AI tools, including OpenAI’s Codex, to tackle the Navier-Stokes problem. Last month, their AIs had at long last found a solution to the Euler equations and verified it in Lean. Their AIs?
- plaidfuji 1mo agoThe whole thing reeks of the desperation of an unprofitable venture-backed startup looking for its next PR win to keep the wind in the sails. But I think what’s being overlooked in the race to claim absolute credit is that both sides ultimately relied on a LLM (and one of OpenAI’s at that). Either a human researcher made a breakthrough discovery with the help of Codex, or the latest GPT model made a breakthrough with the help of human training data, or a little of both… either way it is undeniable that LLMs have quickly become an integral part of R&D workflows and are accelerating research. This would be a major win for any normal company. You could even build a bigger collaboration with this guy, give him a big budget and push for extensions to this preliminary result, and in return do a write up on how he uses your model in his workflow. Huge PR win. What this says to me is that their valuation is so astronomical that they feel the only way to justify it is to demonstrate a fully autonomous discovery bot… which it simply is not.
- simianwords 1mo agoA company that can solve Millenium problems is somehow still can’t ever make profits. How did you come to that conclusion
- plaidfuji 1mo ago1. They are massively unprofitable. It is a statement of fact. Nowhere did I say “can’t ever”. 2. Even their pursuit of this problem was itself unprofitable - $15M in compute to solve a problem with a $1M prize. Not that that was the point, but still.
- curt15 1mo agoIf you transplant a world class mathematician into a chemistry lab, do you expect similarly ground breaking results? Do you expect a top chemist to make major advances in mathematics? The frontier labs are likely betting on lay observers (read: investors) confusing headline-grabbing results in abstract mathematics with phenomenal profitability in more grounded endeavours. There is an implicit fallacy that "If our models can solve mathematics they can do everything else."
- deleted 1mo ago
- fxj 1mo agoFYI: The problem at hand is an existence problem. No real construction of any real formula for the solution is provided, only a singular perturbation expansion. In short: The problem is about whether a solution (of the NS Equations with external driving force) can be found that blows up in finite time. i.e. exhibits infinite velocity at a point even for a viscous flow. The solution: Take a circular curl ansatz which shrinks in xy-direction and elongates in z-direction and see whether you can find linearized waves so that these waves show a blow up when propagated on the curl. Then prove that the higher orders of the perturbation are regular before the T0 singularity time and you have solved the problem. The external force is just the remainder of the NS-Equation right hand side. It is a lot of tedious formula juggling of all the higher orders and some singular perturbation expansions. Perfectly suited for algebra systems. OpenAI was using probably python sympy for the formula work and the researchers had to guide the LLM what to do in higher mathematical language. Here is the paper: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/32d9f210-8b73-45e0-91bc-82a30aef8a9a/navier-stokes.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/32d9f210-8b73-45e0-91bc-82a30aef8... when you upload it to chatgpt astra can explain what they do and why it works, have fun.
- lqstuart 1mo agoThis article reads like it was written by someone who has done less research than the average HN poster. Not a single word of OpenAI threatening people or apologizing for threatening people.
- ChrisArchitect 1mo ago[dupe] Discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605915
- kittikitti 1mo agoHow ironic that academic institutions, that became outrageously expensive on purpose, are now complaining that academic research is too expensive. This is coming from universities with already incredible endowments. They made science pay-to-play but now don't like that their own rules are being applied to them. Maybe instead of giving money as a bribe to get your kid into a good college, you can give the college some GPU's?
- jerf 1mo agoYou know, everyone's focused on the math and the human drama aspects, but to me the real story should be about this accusation that they somehow read the stream of data these guys were generating and then reacted to it at all on a human level is pure poison for their hopes for enterprises to be using their software. Even if these two mathematicians were using the AI services under a clause that nominally allows OpenAI to train on their data, it is still another level above for there to exist some pathway within OpenAI to know that someone is doing something very valuable and important with their AI and to swoop in to try to steal the value of that work. It doesn't matter exactly what that pathway is, just that it exists is a big deal. Today it's a Millennium Prize, but tomorrow, is it the next hot new product category? Is it the patent someone is working on? Does OpenAI constitutionally believe that you may be using their product but whatever you produce really belongs to them and you are just borrowing it? Can we trust contracts that promise that they don't believe that if this is how they act? Even people who are consciously aware that their sessions are being used to train the AI don't expect the AI companies to be in some way scanning the stream of what AI is working on for high-value propositions to snipe. That changes the relationship between these companies and enterprises, and anyone who thinks they may be doing this sort of work, deeply and fundamentally. It isn't just that OpenAI is now something we should be suspicious about for math. It's all high-value science. Is there anyone trying to figure out how to develop a next-generation AI architecture using OpenAI? Better stop, OpenAI could see it and scoop you out of who knows how much value. There is an old story attached to many historical figures that goes: Churchill: Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds? Woman: My goodness… well, I suppose I would. Churchill: Would you sleep with me for a pound? Woman: Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am? Churchill: Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are just haggling over the price. If this accusation is true, which I'm not completely confident about, but if it is true, that is the situation we would be in... we would have established that OpenAI is willing to steal from its customers, the only question is where the line is now, and where the line might be in the future. Honestly the human drama, while the compelling story, is in monetary terms orders of magnitude less important than the question of whether OpenAI has a mechanism to steal ideas from its customers. Has this happened before and they just successfully covered it up? Or maybe the people stolen from thought it was innocent and just a coincidence that they were scooped? If it established that there is a price, I have a lot of questions about that price.
- Simboo 1mo agoQuestion for the maths people please: Is this solution related to strange attractors? Looking at the visualization my mind can’t help but see a resemblance. I would really appreciate anyone’s 2-cents :)
- buellerbueller 1mo agoPerhaps the question should not be "Is OpenAI trustworthy?" but instead "Is any company trustworthy? What does vast amounts of capital do to the trustworthiness of an entity?"
- beyonddream 1mo agoWhat can be done to prevent hostile take over of scientific research from humans by AI ? I hear lot of complaints and hue and cry (fair enough) but are there positive ideas on what to do about this ? (Regressing back to being secretive about one’s scientific endeavor is not the answer)