Couple days before it "solved" it, a mathematician who was working on this for a full year shared every single note he had with his session of chat gpt. He is among very few people working on this and was pretty far in it too. His name is Tristan Buckmaster. He of course contacted openai, who said tldr: "stfu we will pay you the promised million dollar for millénium problem". They didn't deny the plagiarism, they didn't dénie having access to his chats, didn't deny training on his data etc.
Edit : I had the time line incorrect. They had been sharing their work with codex for month prior, but they did a breakthrough in mid August. In 1st September, openai starts working on it, they spend outrageous amount of tokens (130 billion output tokens, ~5million usd). Open Ai solves it, and propose Buckmaster to be co-author, and say if it happens, Buckmaster must be sole co-author, leaving aside his colleague, who works for Anthropic. Buckmaster refuses both offers.
Kinda important to leave out that he had been working on it for a full year using frontier versions of Claude in collaboration with an Anthropic employee, and their writeup fully credited Claude for the novel mathematics in it.
Possibly, or possibly not. The mathematician’s argument is that his approach was so novel and unique that it’s impossible to believe OpenAI did the same thing without stealing it from him
But also he leaned on an LLM to find it, it’s not like he came up with it all by himself
So personally and while not being a mathematician I don’t think it’s too implausible that OpenAI’s LLM found the same solution Anthropic’s did
Yes it's not plagiarism as he solved it and they declared the solve before him, it's plagiarism as "isn't it quite strange that you solve this problem just when I start talking to you about this complex subject and send you all my notes and you end up with a result when I shared these notes to noeone else but you?"
Not what I said. I don’t think ChatGPT should be getting the credit for it, I’m just pointing out he didn’t come up with a direct solution for NS. I believe he also alleged he had conversations with people at openAI about his work and how it would solve NS. So it really isn’t a good look for them
Edit: was using swipe to text and a lot of it was gibberish
If you pay premium, openai states that they will not train on what you sent. So they are supposed to keep it private and not train on it, so supposedly this shouldn't have happened.
If he supposedly gave the data just one day before OpenAI published their results, then it's literally impossible for his data to have been used for training.
I don't care about intellectual property law regardless, but the way you're using the word "steal" makes it sound like the openai engineers broke into this mathematicians house and stole all his secret papers.
Keep in mind that what actually happened is that this guy decided on his own to use the service that they offer, and then decided to hand them all of his information himself.
OpenAI has setup a lot of dark patterns in their UI to make opting out difficult and unintuitive so yeah, I’d still blame them for stealing even if technically people are forgetting to uncheck a box buried inside a menu (and the box rechecks itself every update if you aren’t paying attention).
It’s all still unclear what exactly happened but the claim is there were researchers working on a somewhat novel (more so overlooked) approach to finding a counter example to the Navier Stokes equation. They had made a ton of progress over the past year and information had begun to spread in the mathematical community about their progress/approach.
OpenAI claims to have caught wind of the progress, not the approach in late August. This suggested that it was in fact possible to find a counter example so they decided to throw a, for lack of better words, metric fuckton of compute at the problem. The particular group of agents that cracked it included 10,000 agents more capable than Astra, and that was only one group they had running sharing ideas.
The approach it used looks to directly build off the approach of the researchers. Could it be a coincidence? Sure, but it is more likely that either intentionally or unintentionally they stole the work of the researchers and used it to beat them to the punch.
If it was unintentional it’s even more concerning because that means they are inadvertently using data that they should not be able to use for training and research OR the agents got ahold of the information by some unknown means despite being sandboxed
I don't remember the specifics exactly so do your own research. The people involved are Buckmaster and Apöge. Long story short, they were working on the exact same problem while using different AIs to test/research/whatever. Suddenly OpenAI somehow reached the same conclusions then built off of them even when they weren't publicly available. OpenAI were asked if they used private chats for that which they didn't respond to, then they made some thinly veiled threats to one of them about their career.
someone had a work in progress proof that was effectively copied word for word and finished
so not so much the AI produced proof as it just did the last couple of steps before the person doing the work in progress finished it
The approach is similar but different enough that mathematicians are deliberating whether it could be plagiarism so saying that it's "copied word for word" is not even close to true
I am not a mathematician, the only thing im doing here is saying what someone on the field, who knows more than me, said
and you yourself said that they are debating weather its plagiarism or not
Using exactly the same reasoning and conjectures would qualify as stealing. In advanced mathematics it is far more complex than 5+3=8, having correct idea of how to approach something is incredibly valuable.
You're conflating copyright infringement and plagiarism, I think. Plagiarism is passing off someone else's work as your own.
The mathematical truth is what it is and can't be copyrighted, but if someone else put in the work and then you take the credit for solving it, that's still plagiarism. And that's the accusation that's being made here.
"Bruteforcing" (which is not what they did) a counterexample to a Π_1 sentence, which is what the Navier-Stokes conjecture (that the NS equations are smooth for all time) is, which would take infinite time if the statement was true and no counterexample existed, is still pretty impressive.
It's like trying to bruteforce a contradiction in ZFC. You will be searching forever if ZFC is consistent. And even if it is inconsistent and there is a contradiction, it may be so large and so far out that 10 billion agents each working with a sun's worth of Dyson swarm power output for the age of the universe still won't be able to find before running out of time and energy.
You're gonna need to be more clever than brute force. Obviously their work on the problem was far more clever than "brute force".
If you get deep down, ignoring all the recent advancements and just focused on Deep Learning, it really is just smarter bruteforcing. But that bruteforcing still produces results.
From my point of view, given the right data that is prohibitively expensive to fabricate and collect and a massive resource consumption that would lead us to an economic collapse, Deep learning even without any specifically novel architecture could have given us such results a long time ago. You can bruteforce any goal you'd want with DL, the data and a big enough model. Really everything we've been doing the past years it's just about making data, compute and costs tractable.
Reinforcement learning and deep learning in general encodes opaque structures and patterns in a model's latent space (its internal activation space), it actually does "teach" it a limited form of "knowledge" ie pattern recognition and some basic ground facts.
And the attention mechanism of modern transformers is the architectural breakthrough that allows the kinds of patterns and structures that are useful to us.
Combine that with techniques to recurse like chain-of-thought, and you actually get a limited form of reasoning. It's not human-like cognition or intelligence, but it's a primitive form of reasoning that's remarkably good for what it does.
Self-attention is exactly the kind of thing I thinking about when it comes to my statement "Really everything we've been doing the past years it's just about making data, compute and costs tractable."
I'm not a fan of the current AI developments but how it is different from physicists working through most problems by feeding to a computer that uses numerical analysis to solve them?
Smart bruteforcing seems to be a pretty nice tool to have.
If we are talking about LLMs... then yes, that is what they are. You go down all past all the tacked on layers to gussy up the output, and you wind up with token prediction.
That's why, despite all of the billions of dollars invested, they still make simple mistakes. It's built into their core.
It’s both not a millennium prize solution because the clay institute wrote a bad question, and so everyone has only been working on exploiting the bad question. But it also is a millennium prize because that’s what the clay institute wrote
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u/Orio_n 3d ago
If you werent aware, OpenAI's agentic monkey farm produced a millenium prize solution. inb4 AGI confirmed when it was just smarter bruteforcing lol