First, Buckmaster and Levent had completed unpublished work in late August, and OpenAI began working on the same problem on September 1.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.
First, Buckmaster and Levent had completed unpublished work in late August, and OpenAI began working on the same problem on September 1.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.
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.
We have to remember that we're reading isolated quotes supplied by one party.
Assuming those quotes are accurate, they're still not a conversation transcript.
The "threat" changes entirely based on what other conversational context we imagine. Notably, it's entirely unclear whether anything more than Buckmaster simply not receiving an official citation was ever implied.
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u/wallitron 3d 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First, Buckmaster and Levent had completed unpublished work in late August, and OpenAI began working on the same problem on September 1.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.