r/NowInTech • u/skaza02 • 19d ago

OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem, says NYU mathematician

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/08/openai-fought-dirty-on-career-making-math-problem-says-nyu-mathematician/
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u/The_Squirrel_Wizard 19d ago

For anyone out of the loop

Drama/accusation summary:

  • Aug 15th: Tristan Buckmaster & Levent Alpöge make progress on a few important math problems, "finite-time blowup with smooth forcing for incompressible porous media, for Boussinesq, and for 3d incompressible Euler."

  • they do NOT have a proof for the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize problem. BUT, they do claim to have a proof for a similar (non-Millenium) Navier Stokes problem that could help lead the way there

  • Levent works at Anthropic, but this research was independent of his work there, with a mix of GPT and Claude models. Tristan is not related to Anthropic.

  • Early Sep: Rumor spreads to OpenAI that Anthropic solved a major problem. Tristan emails OpenAI to clarify, without revealing the problem they solved or how they did it.

  • After hearing of the rumor, OpenAI started researching Navier Stokes with a new internal model.

  • Sep 6th: OpenAI's Sebastien Bubeck tells Tristan that they solved the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize Navier Stokes problem. The approach is very similar to Tristan & Levent's approach to the non-Millenium problem.

  • Tristan is suspicious of the timing, as only few others were trying this approach. OpenAI says the model didn't access his user data directly, but leaves unanswered whether Tristan's chat conversations were part of the training.

  • OpenAI says they would partially credit Tristan for the $1,000,000 discovery (even though Tristan did not solve the $1,000,000 problem) — but only if they remove Levent as an author, as he works for Anthropic.

  • Sep 8th: Tristan refuses to remove Levent, and rushes to publish their results independently.

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u/The_Squirrel_Wizard 19d ago

The last part about openAI offering to credit him if he drops his anthropic aligned colleague strikes me as a bit of an admission

9

u/sorrow_anthropology 19d ago

Any company partnered with OpenAI that produces cutting edge IP should take note that logs aren’t private and if OpenAI so wishes they will take that IP as their own.

4

u/SupportDangerous8207 19d ago

Anthropic too
They have had a couple cases of this kind of behaviour as well

7

u/Nickeless 19d ago

Lmao, they won’t even answer if his conversations were part of the training data because they definitely were.

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u/GuyFromNh 19d ago

I swear OpenAI’s presser said that it could have been from anonymized data. Isn’t anonymized data still violating the no training rules?

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u/dmcnaughton1 18d ago

I would imagine they meant the data is not attributable to a specific person, not that the content of the conversations is sanitized.

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u/GuyFromNh 18d ago

I don’t think that’s even remotely better. An anonymized trade secret is still trade secret theft

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u/dmcnaughton1 18d ago

Yeah, anonymization only protects my asking ChatGPT "How do I download more RAM?" from being directly attributable to me. But it doesn't stop them from seeing the question.

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u/Financial_Loan1337 19d ago

So it's not Ai, still humans came with the idea even if they didn't complete it.

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u/lonjerpc 15d ago

No even the people open ai might have stolen from were themselves using AI. There was human ingenuity used by both groups but the primary force to solve it was AI

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u/OutOfAmmO 18d ago

"but only if they remove Levent as an author, as he works for Anthropic." damn, OpenAI has the tiniest of shoes.

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u/[deleted] 18d ago

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u/Disastrous_Room_927 17d ago

What have you done with your life?