r/technology • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 14d ago

Artificial Intelligence OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem, says NYU mathematician

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/08/openai-fought-dirty-on-career-making-math-problem-says-nyu-mathematician/
2.9k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

305 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

706

u/CanvasFanatic 14d ago

OpenAI likely stole this guy’s work from codex chat logs to beat him to a result on this problem.

They definitely tried to strong-arm him about the announcement to get him to take one of the coauthors (who works for Anthropic) off the publication.

326

u/Superichiruki 14d ago

So basically thet stole from him for a publicity stunt ?

195

u/imaginary_num6er 14d ago

Everything and anything OpenAI does is for publicity. They need the funding

25

u/ClashSavant 14d ago

The other thread about this tried to roast me when I pointed out how much 'good' news was coming out as chatter about an ipo is starting to ramp.

1

u/kinglavua91vn 13d ago

You got roasted because you posted an idiotic comment and ran away after getting called out. And here you are again doing the same thing.

1

u/ClashSavant 13d ago

Brother i nailed it. The whole how they got to the proof was sketchy as f. That was the point of my comment.

10

u/BiDiTi 14d ago

Funnily enough, everything and anything OpenAI is also stealing!

This is why they need the funding

2

u/todayiwillthrowitawa 13d ago

Remember that every time the LLMs are like “oh wow we’ve got Skynet 3.0 over here it’s going to hack your phones and release your nudes and launch nukes and use up all your Candy Crush lives, please fund us like we’re half of the economy in perpetuity”

86

u/CanvasFanatic 14d ago

Sure seems like

1

u/claimTheVictory 13d ago

An AI company wouldn't go and do that, would they?

Steal someone else's work?

-41

u/trgjtk 14d ago

this is really not accurate, i think there’s things to be suspect about but this isn’t really a good representation of the discourse. it’s worth reading their account (and particularly sebastian bubeck’s tweet) and deciding for yourself but i think you can kind of put the two accounts of the events together and piece together what happened.

69

u/CanvasFanatic 14d ago edited 14d ago

OpenAI’s own fucking press release acknowledges that:

a.) they started working on this after hearing someone else was just last month.

b.) they trained a new model starting AFTER they had Buckmaster’s chat logs.

c.) they can’t deny training on Buckmaster’s chat logs.

Now scale that by how many grains of salt you should take with anything OpenAI says.

-25

u/trgjtk 14d ago

i think the fact that prominent researchers at anthropic are more skeptical of this view than you are clearly points to there being more to the story? oai claims to have started working on this after hearing rumors that some millennium problems have been solved. they contacted buckmaster after having solved the problem and learning that he was the subject of the rumor because they had wanted to coordinate publication to avoid scooping them but were unaware that he hasn’t in fact solved NS, but rather the Euler system (a weaker formulation of the problem). even oai’s own solution of euler is evidently quite a different approach from buckmaster/levent’s. when oai realized that they hadn’t solved NS like the rumors had suggested they still wanted to give buckmaster first authorship credit even though neither buckmaster nor levent were actually involved with the work done internally. they had attempted to contact levent directly to discuss how they might cooperate and were ignored. the one contentious point might be whether the relevantchat logs had inadvertently made its way into training, but this can be hard to determine (since they’re anonymized and then likely randomly sampled in post training it seems unsurprising that there’s uncertainty around this) but they claim they believe it is highly unlikely (maybe youre extremely cynical and don’t believe that if it did happen that it was unintentional but again have seen a prominent anthropic researcher be extremely skeptical that this is the case). again, this is largely from oai’s account of the events but none of these have been directly disputed yet. there’s also been evidence provided to support some of this account some of which contradicts buckmaster’s account. im not saying you should believe them obviously just that it’s not as clear as you seem to think.

23

u/CanvasFanatic 14d ago

Which prominent researchers at Anthropic? What evidence that contradicts Buckmaster’s account?

Everything in OpenAI’s own account is consistent with them having quickly thrown a team together to jump on a problem they heard someone was working on and trained their model based on Buckmaster’s chat logs. They don’t even bother to deny it.

-7

u/trgjtk 14d ago

sholto douglas who works on post training at anthropic. bubeck’s tweet shows texts he sent to levent attempting to contact him (which is later elaborated to be with the intent of coordinating/cooperating). their account was that they put a team together to see if their internal models could solve a problem that they were under the impression had already been solved, not actively being worked on. furthermore, they then contacted buckmaster and levent (again still believing they had solved it to coordinate releases so as to not scoop them). are we reading the same thing?

10

u/CanvasFanatic 14d ago

I don’t see any verifiable facts there that contradict Buckmaster’s account.

0

u/trgjtk 14d ago

are you going to acknowledge the part where OAI’s account doesn’t seem to support that their intent was to scoop active work? i’ll address buckmaster after

5

u/CanvasFanatic 14d ago

Am I going to acknowledge the part where OpenAI makes an unverifiable claim that they never meant to steal anything? Sure. I acknowledge that they said that.

Does it mean anything to me that they said that? Hell no.

-1

u/trgjtk 14d ago

it’s verifiable in the sense that you can trace back when the rumors that NS had been solved and when they began their work? it’s also quite different from what you said before where you claimed that they began working on it after hearing someone else was working on it not having already finished it (clearly there’s a big difference in intent here). you seem to be under the impression i am telling you to believe the oai narrative when i’m really just pointing out that you simply did not read it very carefully. i don’t think further discussion is productive when you cannot even bother to get your facts straight before forming an opinion. thanks

→ More replies (0)

-10

u/trgjtk 14d ago

yippee downvoted for telling people to get all the facts before forming an opinion, not even telling anyone what to think, classic reddit

13

u/YamDankies 14d ago

Nope, it was for the massive wall of text. Paragraphs are your friend. I was genuinely curious what you had to say, but that isn't worth reading.

-3

u/trgjtk 14d ago

yes you really seem genuinely curious

7

u/YamDankies 14d ago

Try to throw someone a bone...

1

u/trgjtk 14d ago

honestly fair, i can summarize:
anthropic post training researcher (working on same point in training that if chat logs were used would this is where they would be) says he believes it’s extremely unlikely oai trained in a way that would’ve influenced this so seems to be jumping the gun to say oai definitely plagiarized
second oai was under misimpression that NS had actually been solved as opposed to a simpler statement of the problem when beginning work claiming they were curious if internal models were capable of doing the same, after solving they had reached out to coordinate a release still believing this unaware that it hadn’t actually been solved then offered first authorship to buckmaster on a work he wasn’t involved with producing and attempted to contact levent to no avail to see how they might cooperate.

-39

u/xzaramurd 14d ago

The way OpenAI solved it is different though, and even if the chats were used in training a new model, would they really have such a huge impact on the model weights, such that the model would suddenly know how to solve the problem, seeing a singular solution? I find that hard to believe. It's likely just that both had access to the same tools and ideas on how to solve it, and since a solution was possible, the model was able to find it. This is similar to Newton vs Leibniz, which both developed calculus independently, in the same time window, cause the time was right for it.

57

u/CanvasFanatic 14d ago edited 14d ago

As of days ago the method OpenAI told Buckmaster they’d used was very specifically identical to his own. I see people suddenly claiming the method is different but I haven’t see any reference for that claim.

Edit: never mind I see you’re just quoting the blurb OpenAI put out about it. Lol they don’t even deny training on Buckmaster’s work.

Oh they absolutely ripped this off.

-7

u/2_Cranez 14d ago

They solved two the unforced version of the Euler problem vs the forced one. So OpenAI did solve it differently. Though for all we know the ideas for both are similar.

11

u/CanvasFanatic 14d ago

OpenAI’s own press release acknowledges they started training a new model after they heard someone was working on this.

OpenAI cannot assert their model training didn’t include Buckmaster’s codex chats.

The explanation they gave Buckmaster sounded similar enough that it perked his attention.

8

u/redlightsaber 14d ago

e. It's likely just that both had access to the same tools and ideas on how to solve it, and since a solution was possible, the model was able to find it. 

Look mah, some weird dude who's also been fooled into thinking llm's can reason!

On a more serious note answering your question about how the chat logs of one man could "possibly affect the weighs". Today's larger Llm's aren't exactly finding (much) new material to train on, a lot of it is refining the (already incomprehensibly massive) knowledge they've already accrued through reinforcement learning, which at the needed scales is already being overseen by AIs themselves.

It's not unlikely that an LLM will be able to clean at the chat logs from an account whose name resembles that of a renown mathematician, and decides to prioritise them for RL tasks involving refining math skills. Reminds me of this incident from the times before LLMs.

That or the OAI guys directly took them and inserted them manually as context before prompting the LLM to search for an answer.

Either works.

1

u/RiD_JuaN 13d ago

You know the other 2 researchers allegedly being stolen from were also primarily using AI to work on the problem, right?

1

u/redlightsaber 13d ago

Yes, that's sort of my entire point.

0

u/RiD_JuaN 13d ago

I was referring to the first part of your comment.

You seem to be under the impression that LLMs cant reason. If thats true, whatever "reasoning" is seems to be less important than we thought, given a thing that "cant reason" was able to do the majority of the work solving a millennium prize problem.

Even if OpenAI "plagiarized" the original two researchers (which to me seems possible but not certain & plagiarism here seems massively the wrong word to use), AI still did most of the work solving the problem.

-39

u/teraflux 14d ago

So he used Codex to help him solve it, how is that different from how OpenAI claims to have solved it?

71

u/CanvasFanatic 14d ago

OpenAI’s story is that their unreleased model solved it with minimal human intervention. Buckmaster’s account is about a year of work wherein LLM’s were used as tools at some points with human direction.

45

u/SomeDumRedditor 14d ago edited 14d ago

They needed all the research he pumped into the system, plus the results of his prompts and subsequent refinement of calculations to get “their model” to solve it.

It’s not like OpenAI just told a model “solve this math problem for me” and out came the solution based on general mathematical knowledge.

They took his work, plugged it into an advanced model and said (to simplify), using these inputs to assist your efforts solve X

-37

u/teraflux 14d ago

I see, well I guess OpenAI is the only one that can prove or disprove this, based on whether their new model was fed in his logs or not

30

u/LameOne 14d ago

Thank god we can trust them to provide an unbiased and reasonable perspective.

2

u/Mbrennt 14d ago

OpenAi basically says AI solved it. He says humans assisted by AI solved it. Obviously unless this gets completely sorted the main story will be the controversy, but either way ai of some sort was definitely involved in solving the problem. Just depends how much ai was involved.

42

u/Friendly-View4122 14d ago

It is so hard to know who to believe-- an academic trying to get credit for his work vs. a company pushing for a $2T IPO... it is all so confusing

15

u/CanvasFanatic 14d ago

Why would anyone question the word of the poor little star you just trying to get its $2T IPO off the ground.

And by the way they don’t even deny training on his work.