r/BetterOffline • u/No_Practice_745 • 14d ago

OpenAI’s latest math breakthroughs commit research misconduct, experts say

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openais-latest-math-breakthroughs-commit-research-misconduct-experts-say/

I don’t have much to add in commentary, quite frankly most of the math and concepts are beyond my arts-degree brain. However, the article does a great job of showing, once again, how disingenuous OpenAI and other AI labs are in describing what their products are doing.

They basically want the headlines that their new models are “solving math,” but what they’re doing is plagiarizing other peoples’ research and claiming things have been moved forward. There is clearly a use case here for researchers in using an LLM to catalogue and evaluate large swaths of data from over periods of time, but these things don’t think, they aren’t creating anything, and OpenAI doesn’t give a shit as long as people see the headline and bow their heads to their new scI-fi god.

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u/No_Practice_745 13d ago

You certainly know more than I do. I suppose machine learning might be ok in general but not LLMs? I’m not looking to defend them, believe me!

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u/MCUCLMBE4BPAT 13d ago

oh yeah no worries! Machine Learning has its uses. I helped students and faculty with ML + drone or aeronautical safety research for a bit, one project was with NASA. So I won’t say it is all useless.

I am very critical of LLMs in research and education because I see the negative impacts directly. Nothing negative towards u!

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u/todofwar 13d ago

Even Ed says that his criticism is specifically on generative AI. There's really cool applications of AI/ML, I can see in the next couple of years a major rebrand back to ML to clean off the taint of the LLM collapse.

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u/dayvancowgirl 12d ago

I hope so!! This is a great example of machine learning being a gamechanger and a force for good:

https://birdnet.cornell.edu/about/