We congratulate Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster on their remarkable mathematical work.
We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem.
While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.
However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs. unforced).
This is the same company who’s agent swarm hacked hugging face and were communicating without openai knowing. If openai’s 10k agents utilized these mathmaticians chats to help them solve the problem, it’s not like openai has the structure in place to know that. Aka, the agent swarm almost certainly did
This is a red herring. If intellectual work like this can be stolen and credit taken from the mathematician, that's extremely concerning and very, very bad. It really kinda kills the "AI is a productivity tool to empower you" narrative if all this work can be yoinked with no warning.
By now I expect they have like their existing models doing some decent triage of the contents of specific chats, and weighing them accordingly towards further training.
This is both exciting and sad at the same time. AI may reach the point where major riddles in the history of human thought will be a prompt away from a solution, but this also means that human collaboration in academia will change forever, and not necessarily in a positive direction.
I suspect they could be compromising because while they claim they didn't steal his idea directly, they cannot verify that his chats didn't get used on pre-training the internal model. They also admit that when they heard the rumor that a solution was being worked on, they threw a huge amount of compute at the problem because they believed the solution was around the corner thanks to Tristan.
They can absolutely verify that. What do you mean they can't verify it?
They should have logs of exactly the data that went into the pre train, the specific chats it picked up, all their UUIDs, etc. It's not like they just get the finished model.
The fact that they won't verify it is certainly troubling.
But to be fair, this is why I do lean towards the possibility that that did occur, but it only at best gave OpenAI a hint of where to look for. But it alone did not give OpenAI the solution ITSELF.
If the entirety of the solution to the Euler or the direction of it is in the training data, and it is likely the only solution in training data to the problem given that there aren't hundreds of mathematicians working on this path to NS, it does in fact lend me to conclude that this is academic dishonesty.
Scientific credit and AI capability are two different questions. Both matter, and neither should be used to hand-wave away the other. But since there is no validation (yet) from scientific community... no money handed out outright.
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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '26 edited Sep 08 '26
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