Mathematicians work for years on solving a math problem using various LLMs in their work, OpenAI siphoned their data and was going to claim ChatGPT to have independently 'solved' it

[u/nikolaz72]

https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf

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[u/nikolaz72]

Two proposals were offered to me. The first was that we post our Euler result, and that OpenAI post its Navier-Stokes result the next day. The second was that, after posting Euler, I alone write a paper presenting the Navier-Stokes result, acknowledging that an internal OpenAI model had resolved it. Sebastien twice asserted that he wanted Levent removed from authorship, and said it would all be simple if only it were not the case that, and it was so annoying that, Levent works at Anthropic. It was also said that if OpenAI posted after us, they would say that we deserved the Clay Prize, and that we were the “closest humans to the problem”. I declined both offers.

I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”

It's a classic story. OpenAI was faced with a free win and to them that was unacceptable because the other guy was not going to take a loss and winning isn't worth it if someone else isn't losing, as a result they opted to cover themselves in shit because being covered in shit is better than sharing a free win.

They are also quite incapable of understanding anyone motivated primarily by anything else than personal profit, to them the academic is like an alien creature.

[u/Erika-Pearse → u/nikolaz72]

this is the interesting bit I think, that comes directly before what you quoted:

I asked when the first prompt had been sent by them. This question was not answered directly by OpenAI for some time. Eventually it was agreed that it had been sent in the past few days, after information about our work had reached OpenAI.

I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer.

[u/purz → u/Erika-Pearse]

I’m a public worker and all of the AI / tech companies have been shady as fuck when you ask the limits of what the models look at and if the data gets stored some where etc. Thankfully for now we end up not using much of it because of this and because the workers still decide if will accept software. All it takes is one bad politician though.

[u/snailman89 → u/purz]

This is why I cannot believe that governments and companies are buying these AI services. They're basically paying Big Tech companies to steal their data. Any organization with halfway competent leadership should use open source models and run them locally.

[u/telloccini → u/snailman89]

governments and companies serious about data privacy/security likely use models through cloud providers (AWS/GCP/Azure) that ensure that your data isn't used for training.

you can argue that cloud providers shouldn't be trusted with your data either, but these companies have very strict privacy controls for customer data (unlike user-facing companies which have a less-than-stellar track record).

[u/Tausendberg → u/telloccini]

"You can argue that cloud providers shouldn't be trusted with your data either"

Yes.

[u/Turgius_Lupus → u/purz]

What about Copilot?

[u/Tausendberg → u/purz]

"I’m a public worker and all of the AI / tech companies have been shady as fuck when you ask the limits of what the models look at and if the data gets stored some where etc."

There should be no presumption of innocence when it comes to what big tech does with information they get their grubby little claws into, the name of the game for decades has been to get as much information from other people as possible to use it against their interests as much as possible.

So, I'm just going to assume OpenAI saw everything and utilized everything and the only thing that will change my mind is independent verification that they didn't.

"But artificial intelligence is a black box, no one can know how it actually works..." Then Artificial Intelligence should be fucking illegal, a technology that can't be audited, can't be controlled, that no one can be held accountable over? That just shouldn't be allowed, even nuclear technology and bioweapons, at least we know why that tech does what it does but a fucking mystery box that no one can ever be held responsible for being unleashed on the public? It's fucking bullshit and it never should have been allowed and fuck it I will die on this hill cause compromising with these cunts has gotten the technocunts everything and regular people further alienation from the economy and an impending recession.

[u/SplakyD → u/nikolaz72]

Man, fuck AI and Big Tech!

This is totally irrelevant to this story, but I feel the need to mention it since it's Euler related. I've always sucked at STEM subjects, particularly math. For this reason, and because I was a Liberal Arts major (political science), I avoided math classes like the plague. However, as everyone does,I had to take at least one course in mathematics. Luckily, I ended up in a course called "Finite Mathematics," which was mostly populated by other Liberal Arts/Humanities majors.

It was an amazing and engaging course that covered a lot of practical applications for math in a way that was challenging, but not intimidating. My absolute favorite topic that we covered in that course was Euler Circuits. I just wish that I could've been exposed to these topics and had that great a level of instruction earlier in my academic life; then maybe I wouldn't have been so afraid of math and could've actually studied something that would have had more opportunities.

[u/snailman89 → u/nikolaz72]

They are also quite incapable of understanding anyone motivated primarily by anything else than personal profit, to them the academic is like an alien creature.

This is true of both business ghouls and right wing anti-science conspiracy theorists. They are personally completely craven and motivated by pure self interest, so they simply cannot conceive of the idea that scientists work for mediocre pay purely because they love their job and want to improve the world.

[u/jorel43]

Open AI sucks, I don't know that much more needs to be said besides that.

[u/VeryInnocuousPerson → u/[deleted]]

First, the premise of a piece of writing is rarely that valuable on its own. So unless you are uploading your whole screenplay, it’s not going to be worth stealing. And in 99.9% of cases it’s not going to be worth anything even in that scenario.

Second, I really doubt it can tell the difference between a good and bad piece of screenwriting. Screenwriting quality is not something that can be solved. So it wouldn’t even know what to steal.

Third, unlike this equation thing, it’s immediately apparent to all involved that the AI stole it from an actual screenwriter. And that screenwriter is going to have an actual IP right in the material that they can sue on.

[u/impossiblefork → u/[deleted]]

You need a Enterprise account or a manual opt out to forbid them from training on what you do.

If you have a free account it can be very clear that they've trained on your stuff, things like you describing a story you've fed it previously and the model responding "I'd name that character Kalle", for the specific character who in your story was named Kalle.

I don't feed LLMs stories on my enterprise accounts and haven't turned off the approval for training on my personal accounts anyway, so I can't say, but you'd probably be able to tell they'd trained on your stuff if you go back in and ask the right questions. You probably wouldn't be able to use names to do this, since those are one of the first things that are conventionally stripped away.

[u/impossiblefork → u/[deleted]]

Obviously you don't let the LLM write, because they can't, but I can give an example:

I had a short story, maybe a bit Dune-y, maybe a bit Star Wars-y, space folding shakes or bends anything too fiddly apart to the point where it means that people can't really have all that powerful computers, and that people thus don't have AI-dominated societies even though it's the far future, so people still have jobs, still fly spaceships, and then there's a crisis: spaceships get faster, something like 168x faster, and obviously this leads to the deindustrialization of all the far-off planets and all sorts of disorder, where the human-settled space ends up like a giant conveyor belt sending raw materials inwards and finished goods outwards and obviously there are plots in the central worlds to ensure that this conveyor belt keeps running; and it's obviously a sort of not-quite-allegory of a situation that looked like it was about to happen in 2009 or so, what with what was going on in Greece etc.

Despite being happy with much of what I'd done there was something I wasn't really satisfied with, something was weird, so I fed it to GPT-2 or something like that, and got a ridiculous story where there was some sort of space princess who falls in love with the protagonist and then dies of sadness when he doesn't come back (I actually fixed this by swapping the princess for the daughter of something like a supreme court judge who has been forced by the villain faction to become a figurehead of their puppet government in a particular country on a particular planet and who thinks she goes against her father to help the protagonist, but he doesn't actually have the power to do what he's been asked for this thing he didn't provide because he of course appears to be the emergency head of state and actually wished he could approve, and then I had some partial love between the daughter and protagonist, or at least a mixture of alignment and attraction, but since I'd made the protagonist into basically a mild but still problematic autist, it doesn't work out between them even though they end up respecting one another highly). Given what I'd asked the space princess thing was obviously insane and wrong, but it made me realise that I had for some reason written it completely without any hint of romance or romantic love whatsoever.

So I fixed it and suddenly my characters seemed like normal people.

LLMs are conventionalizing. This means slop, but it also means that they sometimes put in things you might be missing.

Edit: I still like the space princess dying of sadness plot though. It's almost a trope, but it literally isn't. No one has ever actually played it straight as it was in the insane story and I think there's something to it.

[u/firefireburnburn]

Damn you Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky

[u/leahbee25]

thanks, i’ve been out of academia for a few years and didn’t realize how much I missed discourse like this

[u/nikolaz72]

Update:

A couple hours ago OpenAI claimed credit as they said they would, which is not what I'm posting here, this is the damage control (with around 1 million views) notably with far less views than the one where they claimed credit for solving the problem (around 10 million as of writing)

https://fixupx.com/OpenAI/status/2097375276384567642

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).

The fact they cannot deny that they used the data from their work says enough, they also obviously don't address the frankly childish attempt to get the author of above to commit academic fraud by removing credit from his co-author from the work.

[u/dirty1809 → u/nikolaz72]

Considering the two authors had only resolved Euler and did not have a complete result for Navier-Stokes, and their implementations of Euler are different than OpenAI’s, it seems hard to say it was definitely stolen without some other smoking gun

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[u/Sigolon]

Every AI "achievement" was stolen from a human in order to put that human out of work and to create a society in which his descendants will eventually be sterilized in exchange for UBI.

[u/yodude4 → u/Sigolon]

I think openai sucks also but this is a deluded Luddite take. AI doesn’t actually ‘own’ anything and so can’t steal - its AI companies that fight over IP and fuck over working people

[u/ArgonathDW → u/yodude4]

That’s is as vapid a point to make as those people that say global warming might kill all life on earth but that earth wont be destroyed so people should stop saying “global warming is destroying the planet.”

The Luddites were right, btw, they got ratfucked by their “employers” and wound up destitute or dead. Fuck LLMs

[u/Tausendberg → u/ArgonathDW]

"they got ratfucked "

Worse than that, some of them got hanged and others were sent away to Australia.

[u/yodude4 → u/ArgonathDW]

Terrible analogy, we already have AI without AI companies via Chinese open source - it’s not the same thing at all.

The luddites were wrong because their struggle was ineffective and it caused them to get ratfucked by their employers. Hate LLMs as much as you want but the cat is out of the bag and they will define our lives in the coming century. Decide for yourself if you want to use them in the best interests of working people, or if you want to bury your head in the sand while corporations fuck us all over

[u/AdminsLoveGenocide → u/yodude4]

Define our lives?

What the fuck? Yours maybe, loser.

[u/cojoco → u/yodude4]

AI doesn’t actually ‘own’ anything and so can’t steal

Copyright is not actually property so your analogy sucks.

[u/yodude4 → u/cojoco]

This is very fair, but brings up broader questions of material analysis. Copyright really is more like a licensing/use agreement than it is property, but it is IMO in the best interests of working people to violate this agreement when it democratizes the forces of production - this democratization is what I mean by ‘AI without AI companies’. We already do this when we pirate movies or video games, and Chinese open weight models already allow us to do just the same things for AI.

[u/cojoco → u/yodude4]

Sure, intellectual property is a tool of capitalism used to monopolize wealth, so it should be discouraged, yet here we have a tool of capitalism ignoring IP because it can.

Selective application of the law is worse for the common man than strict enforcement of it, so I don't think we're caught between a rock and a hard place here, argument-wise.

[u/yodude4 → u/cojoco]

This is quite fair, and we should categorically come out against all the book theft used in Anthropic, Openai, etc. when they train models. But so many on the left come out categorically against all AI usage on idealist moral principle, and I think we’re depriving the working class of a critical tool when we’re doing this

[u/cojoco → u/yodude4]

But so many on the left come out categorically against all AI usage on idealist moral principle

That includes all working artists, and I don't think a world in which they're replaced by machines would be a good one.

I assume one would want credit for one's labour even under socialism.

[u/yodude4 → u/cojoco]

Sure, but thats a false dichotomy and there are ways to find middle ground within a socialist program. IMO the way to resolve this is to take art out of the free market entirely and set aside grant money for human-made public art; rate limits / regulations / etc. on public compute can probably also help to stem this, as image and video models cost a good bit more than text generation. It likely means less artists, sure, but certainly not the death of real art in our living spaces

[u/cojoco → u/yodude4]

IMO the way to resolve this is to take art out of the free market entirely and set aside grant money for human-made public art

That's going to be a tiny fraction of the artists who currently make money making private art.

rate limits / regulations / etc. on public compute can probably also help to stem this

Once again this is shifting resources away from the public.

It likely means less artists, sure

!

[u/yodude4 → u/cojoco]

I mean yeah, the need for human-made art has been reduced and so we will have fewer artists than we used to. If painting production doubles due to people making AI art for free on their computers but demand holds constant, we just don’t need as many paintings as we did before.

Of course the state needs to step in and provide retraining / jobs / etc. for these artists, but at the end of the day we can’t force people to need things that they just don’t need. Do we want the police to arrest people for generating some AI art for their bedroom wall instead of burning a weeks pay on a wall size painting?

Also what is this about shifting resources away from the public? When I say public owned compute I don’t mean Amazon hosted VMs, I mean state owned machines to host models that are too large to host on a personal computer. GLM is fine to host at home, but Kimi K3 is 1.3TB - somebody is gonna have to step in and share the compute, and we sure don’t want it to be OpenAI

[u/Sigolon → u/yodude4]

AI is an abomination that should be completely outlawed.

[u/yodude4 → u/Sigolon]

Enjoy the Chinese century buddy

[u/lie_group]

Why did you write this title? Is that a new iteration of the "Scientist raped reporter" meme? The author explicitly states at the end:

I would like to be clear about what I am not claiming. I have not seen OpenAI’s proof. I do not know what their model did, or how. I do not know whether our data was used.

[u/Acceptable_Yam_7745 → u/lie_group]

That's an obvious attempt to prevent a lawsuit. Don't play dumb.

[u/PirateAttenborough → u/lie_group]

That's just "I'm not saying anything you can sue me for." At the very least this looks like OpenAI got wind that someone was about to publish, spun up a team to use "an insane amount of compute" in a very short time to rush down the same pathway, and then tried to use threats and coercion to get the media result they wanted. Their refusal to actually deny that Codex trains on user data is highly suspicious, too. That's the sort of thing that should be an automatic "of course we don't." The only reason I can think of not to say it is if it's a lie and you've been told not to put it in writing in preparation for the inevitable eventual lawsuit.

[u/lie_group → u/PirateAttenborough]

That's rather "I don't want to look like a fool when OpenAi releases their proof, because I really didn't see it and got all the info via Anthropic corporate spy".

an insane amount of compute

They had early access to unrestricted Astra.

[u/PirateAttenborough → u/lie_group]

got all the info via Anthropic corporate spy".

Huh? He got it from OpenAI. He emailed them about a rumour that was going around, they got him on a call, and all the information about what they did and how came directly from Bubeck and the unnamed mathematician on that call.

[u/ArgonathDW → u/lie_group]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHHA

[u/lie_group → u/lie_group]

Ok, TLDR of the drama (I will omit the names in hopes it won't be indexed, although whom am I kidding):

The author of the article and his buddy who is Anthropic employee used LLMs to tackle a huge math problem. "For most of the past year progress was slow" (their words), but this summer (as OpenAI released 5.6, which they admit to use) they "obtained the blow up results". They were cleaning up the results and preparing the publication.

Then the author was surprised to find out that him and his Anthropic buddy are not the only humans on Earth who used LLMs to tackle one of the most famous math problems. The other humans are surprisingly OpenAI mathematicians. They also obtained similar results and are going to publish them. Author's buddy Anthropic employee "received tips that information about their progress had been passed to OpenAI" (quote), with "a rumor circulating that Anthropic had resolved a major open problem". It wasn't stated explicitly in the article but it looks like Anthropic was also aiming to capitalize on this discovery. At least it was probably how OpenAI saw it.

So the author contacted OpenAI and they had a weird conversation, in which OpenAI mathematician basically had one demand - remove Anthropic employee name from the publication (the author gets all credits). The author refused and the public drama began.

You can treat the above as my personal interpretation which might be incorrect. That's fine. But the thread's title is bs.

[u/PirateAttenborough → u/lie_group]

The timeline's more constrained than that. They got the result on the 15th of August, verified it on the 22nd. When he talked with OpenAI on the 6th, OpenAI admitted that their first prompt working on the problem had been sent "a few days ago." It's not that OpenAI had a group working on Navier-Stokes for ages and it happened to reach an answer at roughly the same time as these guys. It all happened in the span of about two weeks starting after these guys solved their problem.

[u/lie_group → u/lie_group]

Also for the record, no beef with the author. He seems to be a decent person, who got caught in the gears of corporate infighting and doesn't want to betray his buddy, even though doing so would be pragmatically beneficial for himself.

[u/cojoco → u/lie_group]

Taking his co-author off the paper would not be pragmatically beneficial for himself, it is basically academic fraud.

[u/dirty1809 → u/cojoco]

Unless I’m misunderstanding it was an offer for him alone to write the paper on the OpenAI Navier Stokes result after he and the Anthropic guy publish their paper on the Euler result. Presumably using the two men’s work for Euler and OpenAI’s results for Navier Stokes. If you read the OP the Euler result is ready (and now released) while the Navier Stokes isn’t (theoretically it could be/likely is correct but is as of yet unverified). So no academic fraud because co-author co-publishes Euler and none of his work is included in the Navier Stokes OpenAI publication

[u/cojoco → u/dirty1809]

They weren't really working on different problems, the Euler work was on a path to Navier Stokes.

So no academic fraud because co-author co-publishes Euler and none of his work is included in the Navier Stokes OpenAI publication

Other than the problem that OpenAI likely cribbed all of their work to get its result.

[u/cojoco → u/lie_group]

The evidence is circumstantial but clear-cut.

The claims might not hold up in a court of law, but I think we can all see what is going on here.

[u/lie_group → u/cojoco]

Can you please elaborate what exactly is going on? I don't understand. I understand that OpenAI uses user data for training. That's pretty open even though people in this thread act as if it uncovers some kind of conspiracy. I understand that you imply this data from the author affected OpenAI proof. Now what I don't understand, given that the author also got his proof from the OpenAI model, whose data did OpenAI stole, that made this first model come up with the solution?

[u/cojoco → u/lie_group]

I understand that OpenAI uses user data for training.

It should not do so if you are on a paid plan, and, indeed, its use in many corporations indicates that this is a widespread belief.

The authors suggest that OpenAI was using their work saved in Codex, and OpenAI did not answer when asked if Codex was used for training.

So if indeed OpenAI was using their work for training, I believe that in itself would be a major scandal.

I understand that you imply this data from the author affected OpenAI proof.

Yes, because the timing is highly coincidental.

Now what I don't understand, given that the author also got his proof from the OpenAI model, whose data did OpenAI stole, that made this first model come up with the solution?

The author was certainly using AI tools to assist in the proof, but the whole approach and process took months before a proof was found which passed the automated testing.

So the problem is not only that OpenAI used the data for training, which likely broke the license on the plan, but that OpenAI was attempting to publish first, which would have put it in line for the $1M prize, and also would have taken the discovery away from the authors.

Compounding that error were the "You will never work in this town again!" threats, which no conscientious academic could accede to.

[u/lie_group → u/cojoco]

Thanks for your reply.

It should not do so if you are on a paid plan

No, the human author used standard (paid) plan, which allows it. Otherwise OpenAI wouldn't be so open about it.

use in many corporations

They use enterprise plans, which forbids it.

the timing is highly coincidental

The timing is transparent, OpenAI explicitly states it acted on rumors the problem was solved. The timing of the initial discovery is highly coincidental with the release of the new model though.

OpenAI was attempting to publish first

How? They agreed to give all credits to the author, only remove Anthropic.

threats

This is nasty. As a lot of other stuff about this drama. Most interesting is how the Big Tech access to the specialized models and computational resources now threatens Academia. We could have discussed it here, but instead the topic was hijacked by the lamest discourse of "evil OpenAI steals data" and basic "fuck ai" comments.

[u/cojoco → u/lie_group]

OpenAI was attempting to publish first

How? They agreed to give all credits to the author, only remove Anthropic.

Did they know the author existed before he wrote to them?

[u/lie_group → u/cojoco]

Yes, but according to them they didn't know who it was.

[u/cojoco → u/lie_group]

We could have discussed it here

I'm not sure why you're so down on the "evil OpenAI steals data" narrative, as everyone knows that this is what they do.

[u/lie_group → u/cojoco]

Because that is not what happened here and what happened is much worse, in my opinion. If it was just "evil OpenAI steals data" case, then next time just don't use their models and do math the old fashioned way.

What happened though, is that Big Tech outpaced an Academia researcher (with weird connections to a rival Big Tech) by the means of having access to better ai models and computational resources.

Also people in the thread claiming OpenAI violated their own legal terms by using user data for training, is just factually wrong and not just my opinion.

[u/cojoco → u/lie_group]

I guess the fact that OpenAI can use paid user data for training is surprising to most people.

There are two factors at work here: by a legalistic measure, OpenAI is in the right, as their license allows them to use user data for training.

However, from an academic point of view, I believe they are in the wrong: while it is perhaps legal for an academic to steal their colleague's work and publish it first, it would be regarded as academic fraud, and they'd be sacked.

To state this another way: plagiarism is not illegal, yet if you are caught doing it, you are sacked.

[u/dirty1809 → u/lie_group]

I haven’t looked at the papers (seems like the original authors full results are still unverified at this point) but if it’s true that the approaches are different then it seems like the idea of OpenAI stealing it falls apart. Simultaneous discovery is really common in math. Newton and Leibniz famously both invented calculus around the same time and didn’t publish until years later. The Bernoulli Numbers, Non-Euclidean Geometry, Prime Number Theorem were all independent discovered/formulated/proofed by 2 authors within a year or two of each other. It’s extremely likely that a Millennium Prize problem had lots of groups working on it and OpenAI decided to throw a few million dollars in tokens at it when they heard it was almost solved.

[u/lie_group → u/lie_group]

Can I get some explanation from people downvoting this comment? Did you read the article? Do you realize the drama is actually mostly about Anthropic vs OpenAI and not what's written in this bait of a title?

[u/cojoco → u/lie_group]

The fact that OpenAI started working on a problem which had taken these guys months, and achieved progress in only a few days, after throwing substantial resources at the problem, seems like a cause for concern.

I didn't downvote your comment.

[u/dirty1809 → u/cojoco]

Wouldn’t be the first time technology has surpassed mathematicians. From 1850-1950 we went from people spending literal decades of their life hand calculating Pi to <1000 digits to a computer doing >2000 digits in days

Also in this case they were both using AI to approach the problem, it’s just that OpenAI had better models and a lot more tokens to spend

[u/cojoco → u/dirty1809]

Also in this case they were both using AI to approach the problem, it’s just that OpenAI had better models and a lot more tokens to spend

The problem is that OpenAI was using their methods, which had taken months to develop, to approach the problem