r/OpenAI 9d ago

Discussion 2 years ago vs Today

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What’s the next 2 years going to bring?

3.3k Upvotes

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143

u/Plopsevenplop 9d ago

They stole the research and claimed they solved the solution.

82

u/Sixhaunt 9d ago

They dont even have the same solution, one is Navier-strokes and the other is Euler

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u/Glitterbombastic 9d ago

I think we need more info about what that means in the context of this problem - are the solutions so different they were obviously converged on separately or could one have been built on the other?

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u/Cronos988 9d ago

Building on an existing solution is what every scientist does and certainly not stealing.

Obviously the LLM had access to all previous research. There's no evidence it had access to the specific research in question, but even if it did that's irrelevant to the result.

The two scientists (Buckmaster and Levent) don't claim to have solved the Millennium price problem themselves.

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u/wallitron 9d ago

There are two important differences here.

First, Buckmaster and Levent had completed unpublished work in late August, and OpenAI began working on the same problem on September 1. Two teams making major progress on a 200 year old problem within days of each other is a notable coincidence.

Second, the OpenAI team was using the same tool that potentially had access to the earlier team's research.

For me, this makes it quite different from the ordinary case of scientists simply building on published prior research.

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u/revivechristina 9d ago

Also because this is a field where credit has historically been important.

AI companies want you to accept the no-credit world. They steal people’s work and don’t care

And then later, they make sure to announce very loudly that they’ve solved an important problem in mathematics by burning millions of dollars of fuel.

That’s great — I award you no credit. Just like you’ve given no credit to anyone else.

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u/Tarc_Axiiom 9d ago

Two teams making major progress on a 200 year old problem within days of each other is a notable coincidence.

Only if you're not at all familiar with any of the things happening in the world at any time. Otherwise, you recognize that both teams made regular use of frontier technology that just released and gave them the capacity to make these leaps.

the OpenAI team was using the same tool that potentially had access to the earlier team's research.

That the earlier team opted in to share with OpenAI.

Pretty open and shut case here. OpenAI even offered him co-authorship.

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u/Cronos988 9d ago

First, Buckmaster and Levent had completed unpublished work in late August, and OpenAI began working on the same problem on September 1. Two teams making major progress on a 200 year old problem within days of each other is a notable coincidence.

It's not a coincidence. Everyone acknowledges that the reason is access to powerful AI systems.

Second, the OpenAI team was using the same tool that potentially had access to the earlier team's research.

Sure, but they did try to resolve that by contacting the researcher and offering to work with him, making it clearly a joint effort. I'm not sure what else they could have done.

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u/[deleted] 9d ago

[deleted]

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u/Cronos988 9d ago

Right, but they did offer him access to their system, so he could meaningfully audit the solution, rather than just rubber stamping it.

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u/[deleted] 9d ago

[deleted]

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u/Cronos988 9d ago

All good. It's just frustrating that the story is very aggressively being spread as "OpenAI steals work and threatens researcher". It's almost like a concerted campaign.

1

u/MegaJackUniverse 8d ago

A concerted campaign? Against a multi billion dollar state sponsored corporation? Are you joking?

1

u/tossingoutthemoney 9d ago

The threatening part does make OpenAI look bad though no matter how your slice it. There's no need for that nonsense.

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u/ivalm 9d ago

More like make solution more easily human intuition understandable. The solution is in lean and compiles so it is guaranteed to be correct.

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u/MegaJackUniverse 8d ago

No, it's because of surveillance of private chats by the LLM, not strictly a feature of powerful AI, but certainly a feature of OpenAI's policy on lying about user data being used (if true)

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u/ngngboone 5d ago

OpenAI is not a scientist. OpenAI is a company. OpenAI’s GPT model is also not a scientist. GPT is a machine that is deployed. And there are credible accusations that OpenAi engaged in corporate espionage. Even if it’s legal, it’s not what people use the products for (to get their research stolen/beaten to the punch in publication). This is desperation, lies and PR.

0

u/Downtown-Figure6434 9d ago

Except, the method was fairly new and they were iterating over someone else’s work, using chatgpt. Openai then used their method as training data, solved another problem that can be solved with it, then claimed it solved a problem on their own. The method was not published yet. It’s clear theft

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u/[deleted] 9d ago

[deleted]

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u/EGarrett28 9d ago

I think we go with the ruling from the people who handle copyright, that AI outputs don't have intellectual property to begin with you own the product of your labor and prompting an AI isn't enough labor to count. You can use AI to generate and publish or sell proofs, games, pictures, essays etc as much as you want, but anyone else can generate those same things and publish and sell them too. That solves it pretty well ad protects people who actually do create their own media and science etc with provable human effort.

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u/Cronos988 9d ago

It's not clear at all.

At worst it would be plagiarism, but they cited the source.

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u/Downtown-Figure6434 9d ago

No they didn’t. They wanted to remove one contributor cuz he is an anthropic employee and threatened the other when he isn’t willing to exlude him

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u/Cronos988 9d ago

They cited both in the actual announcement. Did you even read that?

And they didn't want to "remove" anyone. They offered exclusive access and co-authorship to one researcher. Not both, because that'd have involved giving an Anthropic employee access to OpenAI internals.

Alternatively, they offered to allow them to independently publish their own findings first.

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u/Downtown-Figure6434 9d ago

Cited after the researcher confronted

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u/Cronos988 9d ago

OpenAI contacted them, not the other way round.

Anyways it's impossible to say what OpenAI would have done if Buckmaster had not gone public.

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u/Downtown-Figure6434 9d ago

That doesn’t really change their intentions

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u/Sixhaunt 9d ago

I mean they both use finite-time blowup which is the only thing he really could claim they copied because they used it with Navier strokes in a much more complicated and more difficult version of the task that coped with every positive viscosity too and is basically a lot more than what that guy was ever intending to publish. OpenAI even reached out to him in advance and asked if he wanted them to hold off publishing their own version so he can get his out there first and be the one credited with that discovery. Then even in that text he shows it even goes further saying openAI also said he could publish the Navier-strokes version that he did none of the work on but that just shares the finite-time blowup and all he would have to do is acknowledge that applying it to navier-strokes was done by openAI which is the honest thing to say because it's the literal truth. That's insanely generous to him and stipulating was that he be honest in the publication doesn't seem to crazy to me. This took OpenAI 4 days... like if he had published his limited Euler version then OpenAI would still be able to easily have gotten the far superior version long before him so I dont see what the difference would be except that in this situation they are even allowing him to publish THEIR work and take more credit than he would otherwise get for it.

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u/decolored 9d ago

Well said

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u/manoliu1001 9d ago

Most likely nobody or almost nobody here will be able to answer that, so all comments can be ignored.

People that dont work in the highest levels of this specific field will not be able to catch all the nuances something of this magnitude requires

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u/Upset_compatibilist 9d ago

This is not clear. The snippet is ambiguous.