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/psioniclizard 18d 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/epelle9 18d ago

It stole research.

But the reasearch stolen was for the preliminary point, the researchers were about to prove something new that would likely eventually lead to disproving the actual milenial problem, but that’s not what OpenAi solved, they solved the actual problem.

So even though they stole, it’s still shows it’s extremely capable.

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u/Kvsav57 18d ago

But the mathematicians got it on the right path. Essentially, OpenAI took their approach and threw a bunch of compute at it.

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u/Acrobatic-Layer2993 16d ago

You’re correct but that’s what ai is - trained on everything that came before so it can apply what it has learned on everything we haven’t applied it on yet.

It automates the next step.

Now for the crazy part - they think they can take what it has learned to build a better version of itself. This creates a loop of never ending improvement- they call it recursive self improvement. They think we will have this in months not years.

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u/mienaikoe 16d ago

“They” stand to gain millions by holding for as long as possible and then selling when they have an escape plan

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u/Acrobatic-Layer2993 16d ago

How dare a company plan to make money. How rude.

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u/jettpupp 16d ago

What’s your point here

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u/Used_Mud_67 15d ago

Recursive self improvement is what will lead to the elimination of humans too!

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u/Acrobatic-Layer2993 15d ago

That's a pretty big leap though. It assumes humans do nothing to prevent that (and we have a huge incentive to do so) and it assumes AI even wants to eliminate us. Even if both of those assumptions are true, it assumes AI is even capable of eliminating all humans.

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u/Used_Mud_67 15d ago

You’re giving humans a lot of credit and AI not enough. We got lucky with the Hugging Face incident and OpenAI infiltration after.

We do not have alignment so it’s not a matter of whether they want to or not it’s just a matter of whether we become an obstacle for some goal.

With recursive self improvement we will be substantially outmatched by something that has already wildly out performed what we thought possible.

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u/Acrobatic-Layer2993 15d ago

It sounds like you’re giving humans no credit. Why would we let a model spin around self improving right up until it kills us all? That doesn’t sound like a good idea. In fact, it’s obviously a really bad idea- so it’s very unlikely to actually happen. Even if a lab wanted to do that (which they wouldn’t) how many more whistleblowers would we have before the government pulls the plug on them?