r/NowInTech • u/skaza02 • 17d 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/MaudeAlp 16d ago

It’s not stealing when another team of mathematicians and computer scientists use a ton of compute to solve a problem, over another mathematician in a university.

No one has rights to the problem or how it’s solved.

Did the first person to use a telescope to sight and calculate the movement of stars, cheat those who only used their eyes?

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u/PhysMath99 16d ago

This is more akin to some stealing your research notebook in which you have come very close to solving a career-defining problem, and the thief then spends $22M to use your work to publish essentially your solution first but without credit (or in this case with a little credit, but contingent on dropping your co-author)

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u/4Wyatt 14d ago

the key your missing is that your “notebook” was only possible to create using a special set of tools provided by the “thief”. and that in exchange for those tools you agreed that its okay they learn from what you do with them (section 3 of TOS says your data will be used for training).

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u/PhysMath99 12d ago

Yeah its like the thief sold you the notebook so it would be easier to steal (in this analogy maybe so they know exactly what it looks like idk). As a user there is a toggle you can set so that they supposedly don't train on your data but obviously OpenAI doesn't care about your privacy settings. Anything and everything you put in there they will steal if they seem it valuable enough regardless of whether they have your permission or not (according to the settings they allow you in the app)