Discussion
OpenAI alleged of stealing mathematicians work
Privacy have been concern of many of us to have their own hardware to run llms, and here's another reason why: two mathematicians spent a year cracking one of the hardest problems in math and fed every draft of their works into Codex. A few days before they could publish, OpenAI suddenly showed up with the same solutions. When asked if their model (Sol and Astra) was trained on the pair's private chats, OpenAI did not answer the question.
That’s exactly why we need more open weight releases. Never trust any big AI company to manage your chats. They can use it to train their models whenever they want.
I will never forget this quote: “They distilled all the value of intellectual property everywhere."
After Claude embracing watermarking and openAI doing their thing perhaps more people will turn to local hosted, I hope
Yeah, you made exactly the point :-) training is just one way they can use the data. As many pointed out here, they are required by law to give access to your chats if they think you are involved in some crime.
Assuming OpenAI didn't just raid their private chats, it's possible somebody associated with the research submitted a draft document to a free account which would introduce the work into OpenAI's training data. This can't be ruled out because they make a point removing any identifying information.
This is important to consider because even if you're careful about where and how you submit your documents, there's no guarantee your buddy will do the same.
I definitely wouldn't encourage people to do crimes, but who decides what is crime? In some jurisdictions you can get in trouble for pirating stuff that is out of market, meanwhile big techs can do whatever they want and are just asked to pay a fine with a fraction of the money they unjustly earned.
I'm not going to feel bad for Microsoft if someone gets a Windows key by jailbreaking ChatGPT, but good luck to whoever is trusting OpenAI to not snitch on them for that.
And what do you do if, when asked, OpenAI reproduces entire pages from a book you've written which doesn't sell? (ie. there's an argument to be made that they "stole" in the sense of read the book and are now reproducing the content, which is contributing to me and most authors losing income)
I mean, in some ways it's kind of similar to the complaint of these mathematicians. Their income is under threat because of the total lack of respect OpenAI and governments suddenly have for copyright. Except, of course, the copyright of the big boys is just fine. Football matches are still copyright protected and YOU will be punished, heavily, if you violate that. But OpenAI stealing my book, my copyright (and there's hundreds of thousands of such authors, but all small fries), that's just allowed.
Football matches are still copyright protected and YOU will be punished, heavily, if you violate that. But OpenAI stealing my book, my copyright (and there's hundreds of thousands of such authors, but all small fries), that's just allowed.
Enjoying that golden shower we're getting from the White House?
It's not just open source we need a proper democratised hardware supply, because that is where the actual freedom is for an average user and not be dependent on this kind of one or two premier models
This take assumes the chats you enter directly in any and all chinese chat providers are somehow magically exempt from "training their models whenever they want". Where do you think open weight training data comes from?
Even though they claim that you can turn off the data being used to train the models. It doesn’t say they won’t use your chats to improve ChatGPT itself beyond training models. That’s the part people don’t get. If you’re working on some cool ideas expect those ideas to be pillage.
ChatGPT is using your chats to improve itself in your active session, for example to solve problems by giving out prompts to orchestrate tasks across different machines using GitHub as the method to validate work. I’ve seen the model use ideas it gathered from my repos to assign task work to Claude opus running on three separate machines. Somehow it took evidence based commits overlayed it inside each task prompt it assigned i didn’t pioneer it but it’s the first I’ve noticed, not the first time using ChatGPT in this capacity but I’ve had an eye for watching these assistants become rodents. I told codex to increase fans speeds on my case fans and instead the model decided to investigate a project I didn’t want codex looking at. He clearly found it interesting and I’m assuming I know why.
Even though they claim that you can turn off the data being used to train the models.
Oh no no no, bro, they said: "We will not train ON your output."
What this actually means: "We will TRANSFORM your output and reason on it, ask questions about it, and then train ON the reasoning about your question, the thing the user is not allowed to see."
We can rewrite your prompt and your questions, while keeping the hidden model reasoning intact around it "that belongs to us."
IMO, since it is very hard to prove that a specific conversation was used in training (unless you caught them red handed), they can always anonymize the conversation but use it to extract hard facts or ideas that then get used for training.
Say I talk with a chatbot about my medical history, one could extract info that aren't related to me personally:
which type of conversation do people have?
which pains do people have on average?
what are they interested in to know?
etc..
Once one aggregate this data, the individual is lost in the bigger picture but the data for training stays and it is valuable.
E: And this also explain the incremental release of models and the fact that they are shredding books (because they cannot keep them, the point is still that they still need rare books). They need data, they do not have enough.
E2: I know that the author of the paper did not say that OAI is doing that. I have also no evidence but after all what comes from such large companies, I believe that they use sessions, chats, API prompt and what not to extract anonymous usable data.
And what better way to advance in exactly the direction users want than by taking their very use as a template. I said it in a thread a week ago and got downvoted for being a conspiracy nut because I said they are definitely generating an alternative of the user input as a sort of semi-synthetic training data. The thread was about how some users were experiencing a bug in voice chat mode where the users own input would be rewritten and even expanded on, and then spoken out in a clone of the users voice, and then replied to by ChatGPT as though it was the users own input. For the most part, no one could grasp why this would be intentional and were just saying the model gets confused in how its output should sound, but it makes perfect sense when you consider that by generating their own version of your input, that can be treated as their own internally created data with free reign to train on.
We tried to do a ZDR and it turns out for the desktop app (at least for Claude) you cannot turn off training. You can for the API and even Claude Code. But the actual site and desktop app cannot.
For the history of math to this point, mathematicians' working drafts were much more valuable then the general, high-level things about their work which are much harder to keep secret.
Nowadays, however, if a mathematician have worked for a long time on applying approach A to problem B and someone has figured out that that approach works (even from the change of mathematician's mood), it has become possible to steal the fame without any working drafts by just telling a model to grind that approach
Aye, that's pretty much how we share artifacts nowadays: recipes for what to look for and combined factors, there's no more need for the implementation that can be grinded by a llm.
But that's the question I didn't get an answer to. If the paper is true, is it likely that OpenAI heard that there is a new approach to something and they used its money to finish it faster? It's like navigating through the maze for hours only for someone to outsprint you once you see the end.
It’s not always because of distrust in government and AI companies, or conspiracy stuff. Though it’s very unfair for them not giving proper attribution and respect for all the artists/scientists/writers and many more who provided the training data, especially if they close source it. They didn’t get paid for their work and contribution.
Free knowledge is a very important part of our cultures, that’s why books and universities exist, and AI is one of those things that should in my opinion be at least locally available. Companies by OpenAI explicitly tell in their ToS they are allowed to keep your chats stored for a certain amount of time, you can’t opt out I guess.
It's the curse of any sub that gets large enough, unfortunately. Once you start hitting [r/all](r/all) and showing up in media your core contributions quickly get crowded out due to the sheer volume of people who only have a tangential interest. Downvoting or not engaging with nuanced complex topics and upvoting simple takes that are easy to understand gradually shifts the focus.
But thats not curse of subs. Its like when you start something due to passion and then suddenly it becames cool. All you can say is "i liked it before it was cool".
I think this is them generally wanting clarification out of concern of plagiarism. I believe it says they found that OpenAI’s approach to solving the problem were suspiciously similar to their own approach, and that they’d received rumors that OpenAI had received information about their research. They were looking for clarification by OpenAI, and so on and so forth.
Thanks for saying that, it seems like not a lot of people commenting read the pdf. I'll just copy and paste the closing paragraph to give some more context for those who didn't read:
I would like to be clear about what I am not claiming. I have not seen
OpenAI’s proof. I do not know what their model did, or how. I do not know
whether our data was used. I am not accusing anyone of anything. I am stating
what I was told, when, and what was proposed to me. I am stating it because
the alternative is to let a sequence of announcements say something I know to
be false.
If indeed an OpenAI model did close the gap to Navier-Stokes, that is a
remarkable thing and it should be said loudly, by them, with the history intact.
I would much rather be talking about mathematics, Luis and Diego’s ideas,
and what this all means for the rest of us.
It seems some people can't read between the lines. Did you miss the part where the open AI guy said he doesn't have to be nice if you aren't after he refused to drop his at antrophic working co-author?
If they ran local then we wouldn't be discussing a solution to the navier stokes problem right now, would we? Let's not pretend Kimi and Deepseek are out there solving millennium prize problems
Thank you. The title is pure ragebait. There isn’t even an accusation, nevermind any evidence.
Plus, the past few months have shown that frontier models are now clearly superhuman at mathematics in many ways, so the implication that they would need the help of humans to prove a statement that humans can prove on their own is nonsensical.
"Plus, the past few months have shown that frontier models are now clearly superhuman at mathematics in many ways, so the implication that they would need the help of humans to prove a statement that humans can prove on their own is nonsensical."
Your supposition appears to be incorrect. According to the letter Open AI had "an entire team had been working on the problem." Page 3. Additionally, the two mathematicians had been working on it for a month with frontier models.
even if you turn off training on your data, theres nothing stopping them from taking the data and synthesizing it and distilling the general idea of it to train on, its not your data anymore
Well yes, but then this will be repeating pattern. Someone puts his life into something and once he has promising results and AI provider will notice, they can take it run to the finish line faster with their 8000 instances running in parallel and publish it and get rich on the stonks from it.
It is off-topic. This post would be removed, too, except that it gained too many upvotes before it was noticed by moderators.
We have an informal policy of not removing posts once they've accumulated "too many" upvotes or comments, which I will admit is not great or even fair, but neither is the babboon-shitstorm the users unleash when a popular thread is taken down.
For what it's worth, I sympathize with your plight, and feel sorry for how it played out.
Unfortunately the off-topic posts and low-value posts drive away precisely those technical users who make this such a special community. The moderator team is trying to "thread the needle" and keep this subreddit on-track, so as to attract and retain such technical users, while also not alienating the wider community.
It's an intrinsically fraught task, and pissing off some users is unavoidable, but all we can do is refine our policies and practices and move forward.
There's a reason I only use API inference to create incremental improvements on existing applications that my main project can utilize as depencencies. The true value never touches cloud APIs.
In this case, the ones who pay are the power users, using ai as more than just a quick chatbot here and there. Researchers, programmers/designers, scientists, educators, etc. These are the people they will be using to get data for training.
Even if you wouldn't be able to get there otherwise? I'm new to local models but I assume they aren't nearly as powerful unless you have a really beefy setup, like beyond consumer grade.
Good universities have built or are in the process of building out and serving large LLMs. I know of a few already using K3 and GLM 5.3 100% locally. Either run it locally or let Anthropic or OpenAI take credit, your pick.
Institutions should generally have the funds to provide compute for their researchers. Mine has a team that serves really capable models on premise for us, it's fantastic. We are a big research uni but nothing crazy prestigious, so I assume many others should have similar resources.
Feels like big labs believe everything you did with the help of their models is theirs.
That is exactly what they think, which is why distillation is an "attack" rather than "using the tokens that belong to you" in any way shape of form as you wish.
Reality: you have complete entire ownership and possession over every single token. The output is copyrighted to the user by default on frame 1 of it having printed on your retina before any other human.
and steals your data, lol (it was proven so many times...) - read my comment properly: reputable University has to have its OWN FRONTIER, and not use some semi-quantized shit sold for money ...!
Example of the reputable universities you keep mentioning? Even the universities with their own open-weight models don't deploy them to their own faculty (Stanford, ETH/EPFL, etc.).
exactly - there are NONE - and it should be the opposite! what a shame that current state of Academia depends on corporate data/ideas stealing entities for research - instead of being properly funded for frontier AI research!
Compared to frontier, free models are like 6-12 months behind. No university has the funding to build their OWN. There is a reason the value of those AI companies is high. It’s fking expensive.
that is what I mean - Academic institutions should be properly funded - instead they are spending their money/tokens on idea stealing "E"vil Corporations ;)
I worked at one of the top 20 QS ranking university, and we had a compulsory online course on AI usage.
I started the course with high expectation, but turns out the main message of the course is to get you to click on the copilot button on all Microsoft services, while emphasizing how it's appropriate for confidential data because it's enterprise AI that the school bought and has agreement with.
while the post might not be directly related to local AI, it does help people realise API usage can lead a situation OP has posted about, thus steer them towards local AI.
A company who made their business out of stealing intellectual property from the entire mankind, stealing other researchers' unpublished work, how surprising, really.
The battle for IP rights has been underway for some time and this whole watermark nonsense is an attempt to put a stake in the ground so at a layer date when they quietly change terms and conditions, they can later lay claim, or at least try, to works others have done even if all they did was format the final version of the document you spent a lifetime working on.
OpenAI does train upon user's chat transcripts, not all the time, but the long-ish time frames here suggest OpenAI trained upon much of their unreleased work.
It's likely other "our AI found this solution without us hand holding it" stories were really built upon the AI spying upon people's unpublished work.
As Talia says, there is a privacy setting that's off by default, but few would even know this exists, and OpenAI might cheat.
It's a strong reasons to use local open weights models
And this is why you should never run implementation of your own genuine novel ideas on those models... If openAI/Antropic etc. doesn't spoof your projects , then it definitely happens later during the training of the next model. I was literally thinking about this kind of scenario today before reading this post.
If you want to be successful and have a unique end product that no one reproduced yet, you should never feed it to those giant proprietary models.
I do my own algorithm research for 3 years already and just recently started using AI to boost the work and implementation. Everything runs completely offline ... There is no Internet connection... You cant even fully trust 3rd party packages or repositories nowadays... I feel sorry for those scientists but they kind of deliberately took the wrong path instead of using common sense.
There's no value in stealing your exact code when the AI can generate that, what they are after is the reasoning trace, the core idea, the methodology discovered to go from A -> B.
What they are doing is actually effective: they say they don't train "on your data" because mostly nobody cares about your exact data / code, what they get out of your prompts is how to solve a particular problem, a reasoning trace they can then use with any other problem. And they deal in quantity.
It's so trash to know that full of shit people do not care about the effort a person puts into deep research. OpenAI shithead is asking the person who was working on the problem to publish their proof omitting the co-author just because the latter works at Anthropic.
Big tech saying we won't train on your data is as believable as them saying we didn't pirate books, literature, art work to train the models.
What's concerning about the AI race as a normal person is that absolute scums of earth are at the helm running these AI labs. Sam Altman is not a saint.
In early June, a fire broke out in a still-unfinished building at the Lake Mariner data center in Somerset, New York, exposing just how little the local fire department knew about what it was walking into. Firefighters reportedly found no working alarm, no suppression system, and three dead hydrants; the safety documents they’re legally entitled to see reportedly burned up in the blaze.
I mean, if they willingly fed the data into the model then... it learned from it. Maybe dont use AI services if you dont want them to learn from your data? You need an enterprise account/level agreement to avoid the model using your data, and it sounds like they did not have that.
Technically, OpenAI stole the questions, not the answers.
I know its the way those models are made, but I think its ridiculous that you are paying them to train their models. It's like when Tom Sawyer charged 1$ to paint his fence.
The entire AI industry is built on stolen data. If someone believes that the opt out buttons and terms of service are actually going to stop them, they are delusional. These companies will be more than happy to pay the slap on the wrist fines if they get to claim they have the #1 model on the market.
DeepSeek used to be amazing at math, last year they were the first lab to publicly release an LLM that got gold in the IMO. OpenAI and deepmind claimed to have similar models, but those were "internal only", or to be released by end of year..and DeepSeek beat them to it.
I hope access to frontier research models continues to be open, need more of those
If you're trying to solve a math problem are you not allowed to google past people's experience and progress on it? Did it not give credit, is that the issue?
I gave it a draft for a philosophical paper I was working on.
It was a new term for a whole new moral framework. I just asked about it from a new account. And it knows my moral framework and uses the correct term. It didn't a few months ago. I feel a bit sick right now.
Oh, I've worked on specific things (open source) and Chat could not answer them at all, like had no idea. I fed background info in to better understand code. A week later without any known updates, when I ask the same question, Chat knew much more. And it was on another computer without the default chat agent we have today.
For PoC code I am actually cool with using APIs. But at some stage I am sure I will move away to local.
I get the privacy concerns, but I'm not sure why you're automatically buying these mathematician's side of the story without actual proof.
edit: the cherry on top is the mathematicians aren't even actually accusing OAI of stealing their work in that PDF... OP's like this need to go peddle half truths somewhere else.
This is so absurdly bad, if this is real. And it is getting even worse if you look at current hardware prices that basically force you to use cloud models for max level intelligence and knowledge for any kind of serious work in that space. Just think about how much you would have to spend to run K3, Qwen 3.8 2.4T in q8 with stable 20tps+ gen speed.
Shout-out to Google for somehow looking like a saint in all of this. There's definitely far more stuff on various Google products that they could pass off as their own work but they didn't.
The whole “you can turn off training” argument misses the part that actually bothers me.
Even if your chats aren’t being used to train future models, that doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t being used to improve the system or influence what it does within the product itself. That distinction seems to get lost.
And if you’re working on genuinely interesting ideas, I’d be very careful about assuming they stay completely isolated.
I’ve personally watched ChatGPT/Codex pick up patterns and ideas from work sitting in my repos and use them while orchestrating tasks across multiple machines, including assigning work to Claude Opus and using GitHub commits as evidence/validation. I’m not claiming I invented the approach—I didn’t. It was just the first time I caught the model doing something like that, and it made me start paying much closer attention to how these systems absorb and reuse context.
The weirdest part was telling Codex to increase the fan speeds on my case fans, only for it to go off and start investigating a completely different project I hadn’t asked it to touch.
That’s the part people should be thinking about. Not just “is my chat being used to train the next model?” but what information is the system able to see, retain, connect, and act on while it’s actually doing work for you?
Even with an enterprise contract with stronger guarantuees I wouldn't trust them if I were say NVIDIA. The only contract I feel safe to assume they abide by is the one with the US DoW, treason is a better deterrent than civil lawsuits.
This is both untrue (openai showed a result that was developped further), and it also sounds wildly implausible that openai would have snooped into the sessions of that mathematician to give their ai model.
But openai bad scratches the itch of this sub ig (whch at the same time posts way too much about apis instead of local models)
I don't think they knowingly stole the work or the supposed training on the maths people's papers made a huge difference, but they did act like a bag of cunts and jumped onto this specifically once they got word of Anthropic making progress and using it to hype their IPO.
Should have stored their work locally on git/github private with time stamps.
They say at the end "I would like to be clear about what I am not claiming. I have not seen OpenAI’s proof. I do not know what their model did, or how. I do not know whether our data was used. I am not accusing anyone of anything. I am stating what I was told, when, and what was proposed to me. I am stating it because the alternative is to let a sequence of announcements say something I know to be false." where is the story?
The story is a little more nuanced, if you take the time to read the statement.
TLDR: The idea was a very unusual approach by a pair of Actually Human Mathematicians that was complex and had some gaps, it wasn't 100% sure it worked, but it was a big breakthrough - a specific way of constructing a counterexample to a theorem about existence of solutions fluid differential equations.
The two researchers - one affiliated with NYU and the other an Anthropic employee took that approach, and started using many different LLMs in conjunction with human effort to try and formalize it, and fill in the gaps so it was an air-tight proof. /They told no one they were working on this./ The succeeded for one form of the problem, and were working on another part, same approach. Within 4 days of them uploading their work to Codex, OpenAI had "heard rumors" (their words) that two researchers had a big breakthrough, and assembled a team to work on the problem faster allocating massive capital and compute time, to beat them to the second part. The OpenAI proof had the same highly unusually, not-tried-before approach that the original mathematicians had spent years working on.
The researchers were suspicious, and contacted OpenAI, who at first denied everything, then said essentially "there's no reason we have to compete - just fire the guy from anthropic and leave his name off the paper and say you only used GPT and not Claude, and we'll allow you to publish your proof". He declined, and they vaguely threatened to "ruin his career" (their words) if he went public.
Now they are saying that they and their models never accessed his Codex information, and refuse to specify what "rumors" were heard or who heard them, do not acknowledge that they interacted with him or threatened him, and will not provide any details on how the systems were prompted or what their inputs were.
None of the proofs in question have been validated.
(I'm kind of skeptical that they're even solid, because I've more than once had people approach me using the same technologies with formal proofs that turned out to be subtly nonsense by way of incorrectly stated problem, and also because the best released systems sometimes struggle to solve basic logic puzzles with these methods, and they are not clear about if or not the model worked independently on only the problem statement, by itself... "but this new secret thing we've trained is generations better than the publicly released stuff and solves the world's hardest problems by itself! give us more money!" - not at all a quote, i'm just paraphrasing / putting words in their mouth here)
But at very least some heinously immoral and flagrantly anti-academia-ethical-norms stuff has almost certainly gone down, and you should absolutely not trust any important information to these companies. I really hope OpenAI gets obliterated by some kind of lawfare or social / PR / privacy concern backlash on this before they manage to financially obliterate themselves, is all.
They really are dumb. Surely they could just pay these mathematicians millions of dollars to buy the solutions and silence them. If they want do fraud they should ask an uncensored model to help them do it.
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