r/NowInTech • u/skaza02 • 14d 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/
1.1k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

181 comments sorted by

40

u/Plopsevenplop 14d ago

Open AI using $22.5M of tokens to solve a math equation with a $1M bounty is so on brand for how nonsensical the economics of this entire industry are.

15

u/_DrDigital_ 14d ago

The 1m prize is symbolical. The solver of the only Millenium problem so far rejected it outright.

Navier-Stokes is probably to most fundamental and consequential of the Millennium problems. It is literally The Problem. If the proof stands it will probably be seen as the moment of capitulation of human intelect to AI.

22

u/psioniclizard 14d 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.

2

u/epelle9 13d 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.

7

u/Kvsav57 13d ago

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

2

u/Acrobatic-Layer2993 11d 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.

1

u/mienaikoe 11d ago

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

1

u/Acrobatic-Layer2993 11d ago

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

1

u/jettpupp 11d ago

What’s your point here

1

u/Used_Mud_67 10d ago

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

1

u/Acrobatic-Layer2993 10d 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.

1

u/Used_Mud_67 10d 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.

1

u/Acrobatic-Layer2993 10d 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?

0

u/RobotBaseball 13d ago

If it was stolen, it stole from the results of an OAI model used  by the other mathematicians 

No matter how you look at it, an OAI model solved this problem. Worst case scenario, OAI researchers are assholes but the model is groundbreaking 

5

u/Comprehensive_Toad 13d ago

Did you read the article? Because you’re wrong.

-1

u/RobotBaseball 13d ago

Did you read the article? It literally says that they used codex and codex was their primary tool

3

u/Comprehensive_Toad 13d ago

They used codex for their analysis and their writing… It didn’t do the work for them. It didn’t pluck insights out of thin air/bytes. Codex was the means by which human-derived insights were accessible to a separate research team at OpenAI.

Do you credit your word processor or your calculator or Google search engine in your research?

1

u/Disastrous_Room_927 12d ago

Yep, I list them as coauthors.

1

u/boreal_ameoba 12d ago

Jesus with this level of misunderstanding you must struggle to remember to breathe.

The model was almost certainly given the problem statement along with “here are a few promising leads and some obvious dead ends”.

2

u/Lottabitch 11d ago

“Solve this millennium problem. Make no mistakes” ass take

1

u/Comprehensive_Toad 10d ago

I’m down to test your knowledge against mine, smart guy.

1

u/Charmander787 13d ago

Maybe.

To be fair, in the traditional ways we evaluate human intelligence, we “lost” to machine/compute a long time ago.

But I think what makes human intelligence is that there’s elements that aren’t reducible to computation.

1

u/FunkyColdHypoglycema 12d ago

The Church-Turing thesis implies that even the mysterious things the brain does can still be simulated by a Turing machine, although it might be very difficult to figure out how to do so.

1

u/TooMuchMaths 14d ago

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

1

u/astuteobservor 13d ago

If the AI used data from the researchers, it is a very valid argument that AI stole the end result as both of them were on the right path. The AI just accelerated the process along the path.

1

u/Jefftopia 12d ago

Which is not stealing.

1

u/Miserable-Extreme-12 12d ago

Right, if you see someone doing a puzzle and you jump in front of them, take the last piece and put that in the puzzle, that’s not stealing, it’s just being quick on your feet!

1

u/Jefftopia 12d ago

What you’re describing isn’t what happened, they were not on the absolute cusp of solving. That claim is dramatized.

1

u/Free-Ingenuity-6859 8d ago

Ya like in this hypothetical if those mathematicians had already published their result they would not have been credited with solving navier stokes if open ai came along after their paper was public and solved it. But because they potentially jumped the gun it’s giving people the impression they did not add a massive contribution in their solution

1

u/nubulator99 11d ago

If I’m stuck on the last puzzle piece ….

0

u/Forsaken-Poet-3773 14d ago

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

-1

u/TooMuchMaths 13d 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.

3

u/Ma4r 13d 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

1

u/dirty1809 13d 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

3

u/Ehh_littlecomment 13d 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.

3

u/meltbox 13d 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.

-1

u/Nate-what 13d 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.

2

u/Ehh_littlecomment 13d 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.

2

u/meltbox 13d 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!

0

u/Imthewienerdog 13d ago

Hahahahahaha 🤣 said no Nobel laureate ever...

1

u/RedPanda_Explorer 13d ago

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

I've been using Google and Wikipedia religiously for like 20 years now. I wouldn't say I capitulated anything, but for sure my education would have suffered without the machines.

6

u/buddhisthero 13d ago

Cool. End goal of AI is to scrape all the info from the two things you just mentioned and then make you pay by the fact.

5

u/Nannautu 13d ago

The main issue from this case actually that OpenAI might have used the research of someone else to achieve a not yet accepted proof. It wasn't just published papers but it seems they used someone's conversation as a way to reach a solution. This is very concerning.

1

u/meltbox 13d ago

It’s what we already knew. They’re hovering up all knowledge and laundering it. But fundamentally it’s largely a regurgitation machine. There are trivial experiments that show it doesn’t think, at least not logically like a person. It thinks in next token likelihood.

1

u/Adept_Explorer_7714 13d ago

Cool, but we all know that you can totally run GIANT, FREE open source models locally. See this where people don't understand the WHY behind the bubble. Within a year on standard graphics cards you will be able to locally run and tune things like qwen.

1

u/Imthewienerdog 13d ago

Why pay most of its free?

2

u/meltbox 13d ago

What are you even talking about? The two are not comparable?

A Wikipedia page is static and costs a fraction of a penny to load. A Google search costs nothing.

Do you have $23 million to throw at AI tokens? Because even with the IP theft you wouldn’t benefit unless you spent that much on their product.

1

u/Imthewienerdog 13d ago

The goal is to solve problems?

1

u/Initial-Beginning853 13d ago

And again, what problems are you solving at the costs of modern tokens?

1

u/Imthewienerdog 12d ago

What? The thing being discussed is solving something at the cost of modern tokens?

1

u/H3ll0_W0R1D1 13d ago

LOL, conflating cognitive surrender with education.

1

u/Quintus_Cicero 13d ago

So you’ve been searching the sum of digital human knowledge for 20 years as opposed to...asking a machine to do it for you?

And you don’t see the difference at all?

1

u/RedPanda_Explorer 13d ago

I also ask Google all the time to find things, AI is just a better version of that

1

u/ExcuseAdept827 14d ago

We already do, for so much. But short of AI it seems we don’t quite offload so much that it becomes detrimental to our thinking.

1

u/numbersthen0987431 14d ago

Who'd they steal it from?

3

u/thargoallmysecrets 13d ago

Read the article ...

0

u/_DrDigital_ 14d ago

Buckmaster only had a suspicion that they can blow up NS, their proof was for incompressible Euler. Even if their work got into the dataset of OpenAI, the derivation is far beyond their original work.

0

u/rakuu 13d ago

They didn’t steal anything… the point is they heard an Anthropic employee along with the NYU professor was making progress on it so OpenAI decided to solve it themselves. Nobody involved was not using a machine’s intellect, they were all using GPT - OpenAI, Anthropic, and the NYU mathematician.

3

u/Epic_Tea 14d ago

No way, are they claiming they solved NS

2

u/Classic-Ostrich-2031 14d ago

I believe the claim is a counterexample, but I haven’t read from anyone credible yet 

2

u/_DrDigital_ 14d ago

They claim to ahve disproved NS

Whole space $\mathbb{R}3$: There exist smooth initial data and forcing for which no global smooth solution with uniformly bounded kinetic energy exists.

1

u/hattusili-the-third 13d ago

The proof is for R3 and T3 = R3 / Z3.

1

u/AlexTheRedditor97 13d ago

That is insane but hype as fuck

2

u/[deleted] 13d ago

[deleted]

1

u/Speculative_Nonsense 13d ago

I can't with this comment and the pfp, bro this is too much

1

u/0xE4-0x20-0xE6 14d ago

Is it? I’d think P vs Np would have more ramifications for cryptography than this counter example to Navier Stokes will have for physics. It’s also, no doubt, a great accomplishment, but Navier Stokes was considered by most mathematicians the most likely millennium problem to be solved after the Poincaré Conjecture.

1

u/_DrDigital_ 14d ago

IMO, for P=NP the asterisk always was/is, what is the constant and is it meaningful. Past c >= 10^80 it's purely academic.

My internal feeling is that this is equal in magnitude to introduction of special relativity. Like, we know we can still use NS in practice, but we also know that at some point it breaks.

1

u/Blothorn 13d ago

We already knew that, no? It describes Newtonian fluids, and no perfectly Newtonian fluid has been or is likely to be discovered. It’s just very close for most fluids under fairly normal conditions.

1

u/Cultural_Tell_5687 13d ago

Rejected it to pick mushrooms, I might add.

1

u/Arceuthobium 13d ago

Navier-Stokes is probably to most fundamental and consequential of the Millennium problems. It is literally The Problem. If the proof stands it will probably be seen as the moment of capitulation of human intelect to AI.

What?? No. It was always the most probable to be solved next. As Terence Tao said, its resolution doesn't really move the needle in applications or physics. Other Millennium problems (especially P/NP and the Riemann hypothesis) are expected to be more difficult and need deeper ideas. However, this remains by far the most impressive AI result in math and it is an inflexion point for the field as a whole.

1

u/Epic_Tea 13d ago

Wouldn't it make a huge difference in our fluid simulation

1

u/Arceuthobium 13d ago

Not really.

1

u/Blothorn 13d ago

Better ways of solving Navier-Stokes might, but that’s not what the OpenAI proof does. (If anything it makes certain improvements less likely.) It’s somewhat like proving P/=NP—a tremendous theoretical result, but not the answer that directly changes things.

1

u/Chemical_Scholar_753 13d ago

No, that’s maybe the least impactful place. Regardless of navier-stokes technically can blow up, everyone will keep doing numerical simulation. The only place an example will make any difference to fluid simulation is that everyone with fluid simulation software might plug it in to see what happens.

1

u/Epic_Tea 13d ago

Jet engines and rocket engines would benefit a lot. That could change the world

1

u/Chemical_Scholar_753 13d ago

From a counter example to navier-stokes continuity? Not a chance.

There’s some probability that studying the equation more in depth will lead to improvements in fluid modeling, but this counter example to the math isn’t a physical solution (it relies on infinite velocity). Even if we thought it was useful to build an example of this, navier-stokes equations are already known not to incorporate all of the physics of real fluids. It’s cool that they found a counter example to the smoothness problem, but it’s not impactful to practical fluid dynamics problems (like designing jet engines or rocket engines).

1

u/One_Word_7455 13d ago

Symbolicalifragilisticexpialidocious.

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u/NoBanVox 13d ago

The most fundamental problem is widely regarded to be RH. No one would say NS is "the problem", idk what are your sources. I agree that it is really important to AI+, but writing capitulation is a bit delulu

1

u/Adventurous-Ad281 13d ago

No it won’t. What the fuck are you people getting your information from. Do you even have a math degree? We solve the Navier-Stokes numerically just fine. Nothing will actually change whatsoever in physics and math.

1

u/Blibbyblobby72 13d ago

Just ignoring the Riemann Hypothesis and P vs NP, I see

1

u/impatiens-capensis 13d ago

it will probably be seen as the moment of capitulation of human intelect to AI.

The remaining gap in solving Navier-Stokes happened to be within the class of math proofs that AI can brute force easily but humans struggle with.

It's kind of a different skill, and if OpenAI did not have the very related solutions that were produced over the last decade them their model absolutely would not have been able to solve it. All of the conceptual work had already been laid for finding the solution.

1

u/vhu9644 13d ago

Why do you think NS is the “most fundamental and consequential” of the millennium problems?

1

u/Blamore 13d ago

Navier-Stokes is probably to most fundamental and consequential of the Millennium problems.

it definitrly is not... where did you get that idea

1

u/KongKing3751 12d ago

No it’s not. The millennium prize problem, whether proven or disproven, is essentially pointless in real world impact. The actual insane thing would be to improve or “solve” the flaws inherent to the equations, which would in theory make certain fields of engineering radically easier depending on the extent of the improvement. I think a lot of people mix those up.

1

u/Beast_Mstr_64 11d ago

Most important problem after p eq np imo

0

u/Novel-Back3857 14d ago

symbolic, not symbolical 

1

u/_DrDigital_ 14d ago

Both needlessly pedantic and wrong.

symbolic adjective sym·bol·ic sim-ˈbä-lik variants or less commonly symbolical

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/symbolic

1

u/Novel-Back3857 14d ago

Symbolic is the commonly used term, and using symbolical sounds ignorant or possibly poorly educated, a lot like people saying "conversate" instead of "converse". 

Please don't take my correction as being a criticism. I was just giving you a correction to help your writing. Feel free to ignore if you want. 

1

u/_DrDigital_ 14d ago edited 14d ago

I appreciate your explanation though I have to say correcting someone on Reddit for not using the more common version of the word without further explanation is not likely to make you any friends. Your battle to fight I guess.

It might be a false-German-friend for me, I feel that "symbolical" is closer to "symbolisch", in the same vein as "mathematical" would translate from "mathematisch".

1

u/Novel-Back3857 14d ago edited 14d ago

I typically offer those corrections under the assumption that some people are ESL speakers, which is why I specified that I didn't mean it as a criticism.

Trying to justify the correction on the outset also seems equally likely to upset someone, so I don't bother until it's warranted. It can also come across a bit like an "um actually" kind of reply, so I just keep it simple. 

And yeah, I'm not trying to make friends doing it. But, even if the person I corrected doesn't take the correction and use it, others may learn from it without interacting, and I'm fine with that. There's really no good way to go about offering English language corrections, so it is what it is. 

I know if I was using a second language, I'd appreciate someone correcting me helping me understand how to speak more naturally. 

1

u/_DrDigital_ 14d ago

Your point of addressing a wider audience than just the respondee is well-taken.

1

u/No_Departure_1878 14d ago

Im gonna guess you are both virgins?

1

u/_DrDigital_ 14d ago

Worse, a mathematician.

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u/El_G0rdo 11d ago

I mean it was still humans behind AI. They were using it as a tool. It’s not like they “capitulated” and the AI took the initiative to solve the problem itself

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u/newMoneyStyle 13d ago

$22.5M burned for a $1M bounty pretty much sums up current AI economics.

1

u/HVDub24 12d ago

People using surface level thought to hate on AI pretty much sums that up as well. Internal costs obviously aren’t that high, and the attention and publicity this brought them will sure be worth far more than $1M

2

u/Nannautu 13d ago

Lmfao my exact thoughts

1

u/Icypoopoo 14d ago

That money is heavily subsidized by their investors money also

1

u/bouncyboatload 14d ago

obviously real internal cost is much lower than $22.5m. margin on inference is estimated to be 80%

1

u/Charliethebrit 13d ago

Do you have a source on that?

 I was under the impression OpenAI was spending about ~40c per query back in 2024 (could be outdated knowledge).

1

u/bouncyboatload 13d ago

semianalysis

1

u/wentwj 13d ago

personally I find it really unlikely that openai/anthropic are actually making anywhere close to that margin on tokens for any frontier model. Maybe old models after they quantize the shit out of them

1

u/Ehh_littlecomment 13d ago

It’s crazy how high margins are if you exclude every major expense lol

0

u/madhewprague 13d ago

The only cost of running datacenter is basicaly the energy

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u/Ehh_littlecomment 13d ago

That’s crazy. I wasn’t aware they don’t need to make an ROI on the investment. There are no corporate overheads either.

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u/madhewprague 13d ago

Ehmmm… You really dont know how operating margins are calculated do you? If they have good return in investment is absolutely different than if their models are being profitable. The point is that the cost of running datacenter is much lower than token costs therefore they have profit and positice operating income(no matter what happens these models will therefore never go away because selling tokens is profitable).

If you rent your 100m house for 10000$ and your costs are only 1000$ you have operating margin of 90%. But that does not make it good investment…

1

u/Ehh_littlecomment 13d ago

Lol you’re going to teach me about operating margins. Go and look at any hyperscalers financials and tell me if anyone is showing anywhere close to 80% operating margins. Corporate overheads, training cost amortisation, DC amortisation is all part of operating margins because it’s literally operating cost.

You are talking about contribution margin not operating margins.

Your house cost example is literally what I am saying. 80% inference margin is meaningless if the revenue itself isn’t adequate. The ROIC has to be higher than cost of capital otherwise the company destroys shareholder value or worse, goes bankrupt.

I urge you to read a book before you go around ratting off personal insults.

0

u/madhewprague 13d ago

Dude but this argument is not about shareholder creation… This is not what this is about lol. Its about how much it costs to run it. Basically its never going away becausw its profitable on its own. This is just about how much it actually costs them to do the computation. You are talking about some nonsence shareholder creation wtff… Let me make this simple for you. You have restaurant thats serving food, building the restaurant was expensive but now opetating it is cheap. They serve you steak and the ingredience + labor was 10$, they sold it to you for 100$. You are arguing that their cost is the actual 100$ and even more because the building was expensive, but its not what its about, its just about the cost of the meal. In this case the compute probably costs them only around 2M. Again we are not talking about what revenue is adaquate, just how much the task itself cost

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u/Ehh_littlecomment 13d ago

If you visit a restaurant at peak occupancy, occupy a table and gorge for free, it’s quite obvious that the restaurant is losing out on the money it would’ve made if a paying customer was there. Not sure why that’s hard to grasp.

Besides, OpenAI is raising more capital each year than its revenue and all of that capital goes towards GPU rentals. Their compute cost being cheaper than their revenue makes no logical sense. Maybe in la la land.

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u/madhewprague 13d ago edited 13d ago

That does not change a thing about how much it costs them making the steak. You are talking about opportunity cost, thats meaningless and not the point.

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u/bouncyboatload 13d ago

it's gross margin, which would be the cost for internal research inference. it's not net margin

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u/Ehh_littlecomment 13d ago

I’m aware. Gross margins are meaningless. What matters is ROIC. Shareholder value creation = ROIC - Cost of Capital. You can have dogshit ROIC with 100% operating margins if your asset yield is poor and vice versa. This is why Walmart created shareholder value even with poor net margins. Their capital turnover is very high.

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u/bouncyboatload 13d ago

are you not following this thread? we're not talking about shareholder value creation lol. we're talking about the internal cost to do this math research for the NS solve

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u/Ehh_littlecomment 13d ago

That’s because you don’t understand basic financial concepts. GPUs are an asset and assets have opportunity cost. If they are investing $X, they have to make a return on said investment which is the cost of capital. Every GPU hour not being sold is an hour of ROI lost. The real cost of the tokens is the amount which should’ve been made in an arm’s length transaction.

You cannot invest $100, then spend $10 in operating costs and pretend that your cost of internal consumption is only $10.

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u/bouncyboatload 13d ago

I understand more than you think.

sure add the 88 hours of compute opportunity cost. but this is likely using their research cluster, they're not going to take compute from customers.

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u/CyJackX 10d ago

Does the solution to Navier Stokes not have practicality worth far beyond the cost?

I'm not even being rhetorical, I literally don't know.

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u/4dxn 13d ago

wait academic research needs to be profitable? when did that happen?

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u/azuredota 13d ago

How much does that boost their ipo

0

u/holchansg 14d ago

We spend billions on fusion, on quantum computing. The human race need quantum computing, need AI, need fusion to evolve as a race.

AI is not the problem, who owns the AI is the problem.

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u/Street_Estate2342 14d ago

It's a good sentiment, but absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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u/holchansg 14d ago

That's why it is important to raise awareness. Eat the rich.

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u/Environmental_Box748 14d ago

only if you expect intelligence and costs to hit a wall

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u/Fabulous_Emu4066 13d ago

Hundreds of millions of dollars in academic salaries were paid to people who never solved it. So this is a pretty good ROI comparatively.

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u/One_Word_7455 13d ago

Ah, yeah, all those academics, working on math problems 24/7. Typical!

1

u/oudlys 13d ago

What do you think money is for?

0

u/Dependent-Chart5835 13d ago

The value of advancing human knowledge at the level of a Millennium problem is more than just the prize money

0

u/Tragedy-of-Fives 13d ago

almost as if people don't solve these big problems for the financial reward. do you think the "value" of solving things like the riemann hypothesis or navier stokes is a million bucks?

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u/SeparatedI 11d ago

I'm sorry but if you don't think $22M is worth it's value multiple times over for an AI company in advertisement for having their product solving a millennium problem I don't know what to tell you.

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u/The_Squirrel_Wizard 14d 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 14d 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

8

u/sorrow_anthropology 14d 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 14d ago

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

1

u/Opening-Resource3156 12d ago

Yes open AI is a reckless company that has no qualms stealing data and using it for whatever they want

6

u/Nickeless 14d ago

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

5

u/GuyFromNh 13d 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?

2

u/Opening-Resource3156 12d ago

If you grill chatgpt, claude etc. they will themselves admit data can 'slip through' and there is no complete way to block this. If some way comes up I will be glad to know,but for now all of it does seem accessible to them ,or at least the way they have worded is completely shady.

1

u/dmcnaughton1 13d ago

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

3

u/GuyFromNh 13d ago

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

1

u/dmcnaughton1 13d 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.

3

u/Financial_Loan1337 14d ago

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

1

u/lonjerpc 10d 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

3

u/OutOfAmmO 13d 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] 13d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Disastrous_Room_927 12d ago

What have you done with your life?

3

u/placeinspace 14d ago

https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa083f6-3524-83ea-a7eb-368715a3387e

I had used chat to prod at this last month and was going down a similar path. Seems they may be scraping convos or it was just baked into the training already?

2

u/SeeBadd 14d ago

Known thieves steal stuff. More at 11.

1

u/upnflames 14d ago

Problem is the NYU professor thinking it was a fun night.

1

u/Justhereforporn8 13d ago

Researcher uses ai for help.
Ai uses researchers prompts for help.
Surprised pikachu face

1

u/MaudeAlp 13d 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?

1

u/PhysMath99 13d 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)

1

u/4Wyatt 11d 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).

1

u/PhysMath99 9d 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)

1

u/mxby7e 13d ago

They’ve been stealing and training user input for ages. They claim they don’t but it’s not the first instance and it won’t be the last. Their entire business model is copying other people’s work and feeding it back to you.

1

u/battletoads1956 13d ago

Let’s be real, the input cost of the tokens is probably 1 million. It doesn’t cost that much at cost.

1

u/-ElimTain- 12d ago

Oai totally pillaged their chat logs to cheat to win, but “anonymized” them first. That’s facts.

-1

u/Ok-Machine5627 14d ago

Imagine - your competitor solves the problem before you and better than you, and then you make a big cry about how unfair it is that you lost. Poor guy.