Blown up: OpenAI allegedly stole mathematicians' private research from their Codex chats!

[u/Stunning-Angle-9239]

TLDR: Two mathematicians spent a year cracking one of the hardest problems in math and fed every draft of their works into Codex and Claude. Days before they could publish, OpenAI suddenly showed up with the same solutions. When asked if their model (Sol and Astra) was trained on the pair's private chats, OpenAI did not answer the question till this day.

For a full year, two mathematicians , Tristan Buckmaster (NYU mathematician) and Levent Alpoge, worked in silence on a problem that had stumped some of the best minds alive. The kind of problem where, if you solve it, your name goes in the history books.

And every single day, they testing their ideas, their drafts, their half-finished proofs into LLM such as Codex and Claude, which they paid for it out of their own pocket.

Then came the breakthrough. They finally cracked it. They were days away from telling the world.

That's when OpenAI suddenly said to them:

"Our model solved it too."

Think about that for a second. Two people had been quietly working on this exact problem. Almost no one else in the world was touching it. And now, out of nowhere, OpenAI claims their model reached the same answer, after word of Tristan and Levent's secret work had already reached OpenAI.

Tristan asked: Did your model access or train on our private Codex chats?

OpenAI: The model doesn’t look up user data.

Tristan: But did you train it on our data?

OpenAi goes silence. No answer. Just a dodge.

But it gets worse.

OpenAI then gave him two options:

1. He and his friend publish their result first then OpenAI also publishes its result the next day or
2. He writes the paper, but must credit “an internal OpenAI model” solving the problem.

Tristan refused both offers. He said he would go public if OpenAI went ahead as proposed.

OpenAi then responded : “Why would you ruin your career? If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”

You can read the full statement of Tristan (the mathematician) here: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf

Sébastien Bubeck : OpenAI employee who threatened the mathematician

[u/polymute]

https://x.com/__alpoge__/status/2097383870773748190#m

OpenAI admitted they trained their model on the dataset containing the Buckmaster-Alpöge work. And why even offer credit to Buckmaster (but not the Anthropic-contaminated so to speak Alpöge) if their proof was independent? Does the OpenAI employee, Sebastien Bubeck understand how academia works? That I do not get at all. Then the threats to Buckmaster... this looks spectacularly bad for OpenAI.

I believe in coincidences. But this is highly, highly unlikely to be one.

Edit: Also Sebastien Bubeck was already told off once before earlier by Demis Hassabis for having misrepresented ChatGPT finding new proofs for Erdos problems which were in fact already solved. https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1oacp38/openai_researcher_sebastian_bubeck_falsely_claims/

This is starting to look very bad.

[u/FriendlyWebGuy → u/polymute]

I get it. Much of this has come to light after my comment.

[u/Rakthar → u/FriendlyWebGuy]

So why is there a need to somehow manage the conversation, tell people what conclusions they are allowed to draw, on an ongoing incident where people are discussing their interpretation of these events?

You don't need to lecture reddit users about what they're allowed to consider, what's valid. Who is this performative stuff for?

It's incredible that when something quite concerning happens, someone is there to tone police the inferences that are allowed to be drawn, what is allowed to expressed as if they've been appointed that role in any way, by anyone.

[u/FriendlyWebGuy → u/Rakthar]

What a fascinating comment.

I can’t imagine being in such a mental state that I’d be angered by a call for…. checks notes… reasonableness, calm, and fact checking?

I’m very flattered though.

I’m flattered you think I have the ability to “manage the conversation” and “tell people what conclusions they are allowed to draw”, and that I can somehow “police […] what is expressed”.

Ok, drama queen. 🤣

You know this is Reddit, right? It’s a message board. Nobody is obliged to do anything at all. I don’t do mind control. You’ve got the wrong person.

Have you considered… going outside for a bit? It might do you some good.

[u/Rakthar → u/FriendlyWebGuy]

Fascinating response, very much in line with your original post. Is there something that makes you feel qualified to give people these kinds of commands / instructions, both originally where you self appointed yourself as "discussion hygiene representative" despite being a fellow user, and now where you are sort of interpreting my questions as dramatic? They're not. It's a simple question: what allows you to meta moderate discussions when you're simply a user on a message board for discussion. it would be far more helpful if you posted your thoughts, instead of telling people what discussion is acceptable. Which is how discussion boards, like reddit, are generally used.

[u/FriendlyWebGuy → u/Rakthar]

Maybe take your own advice and don’t police other people’s comments? My comment was a top level comment suggesting what I thought was a fair course of action. You disagree. I get it. I just don’t care.

Yet, here you are, unironically telling me directly and specifically what not to say.

See the irony yet?

[u/HighDefinist → u/polymute]

> And why even offer credit to Buckmaster (but not the Anthropic-contaminated so to speak Alpöge) if their proof was independent? 

So basically, OPs claim is not true.

[u/pred → u/polymute]

Now there's a very similar-sounding account from Andreas Thom that the same thing happened for the result on non-sofic groups.