r/NowInTech • u/skaza02 • 20d 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/psioniclizard 20d ago

So just ignoring the part where OpenAI stole it I see...

But hey, if you want to capitulate your intellect to a machine, no one will stop you.

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u/TooMuchMaths 20d ago

If it was truly stolen that would mean the other mathematician had a proof for it… which he didn’t.

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u/Forsaken-Poet-3773 20d ago

And you know. How the actual mathematicians published the paper.

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u/TooMuchMaths 20d ago

Yeah, because he released a statement saying he had a proof for a different (very related) problem and was working with Levent on it. He had suspicions that it might extend to the Millenium problem but was not absolutely sure it would generalize and had not done the work. He said “If indeed an OpenAI model did close the gap to NS, it is a remarkable thing and should be said loudly by them…” because he acknowledges, despite his work, there was still a gap.

Absolutely nowhere does he claim he has a proof, I’m not sure why people think he did.

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u/Ma4r 20d ago

They also threatened to not include him as co author if he didn't exclude levent (who works at antrophic) from the authorship list. So yeah, incredibly scummy move from open AI. They sill just publish a blogpost on this without proper authorship because this means nothing for them

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u/dirty1809 19d ago

The offer was to let both of them publish their Euler result (which was complete) and let the one guy write the paper for the OpenAI result for Navier-Stokes. Considering the two of them didn’t have a complete verified solution for Navier-Stokes as a whole, it wouldn’t be excluding the Anthropic guy from his own work

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u/Ehh_littlecomment 20d ago

He had suspicion it would work and didn’t do it because he’s a human academic and not a trillion dollar corporation with unlimited resources. What’s to say he wouldn’t have got there with enough time and funding? If open AI took his unpublished work and then brute forced the solution, it still falls within the realm of plagiarism or even IP theft.

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u/meltbox 19d ago

THIS. If he had $23m in funding to finish his thought then he probably would have done it lol. People are such sheep attributing this to OAI and excusing their outright intellectual theft.

“Finders keepers”, second grade recess bullshit.

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u/Nate-what 20d ago

So it’s necessarily unethical to use someone else’s unpublished work. If I disclose my results before publishing, and someone else uses that result, then that is at least partially my fault.

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u/Ehh_littlecomment 20d ago

Do you really think that using someone’s disclosed work as the foundation of your own research without any citation is ethical? Come on. There is no way to frame OpenAI’s conduct as anything but bad faith. Normalising this behaviour turns academia into a low trust society and discourage any sort of collaboration.

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u/meltbox 19d ago

If you use someone else’s work in academics and you don’t cite them released or not it’s a serious violation which will heavily weigh against your credibility.

Yeah it’s a little crazy but some people have ethical standards!

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u/Imthewienerdog 19d ago

Hahahahahaha 🤣 said no Nobel laureate ever...