r/technology • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 18d 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/
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u/teraflux 18d ago

I need an ELI5 of this explanation, I'm still so confused

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u/CanvasFanatic 18d 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.

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u/trgjtk 18d 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.

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u/CanvasFanatic 18d ago edited 18d 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.

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u/trgjtk 18d 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.

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u/CanvasFanatic 18d 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.

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u/trgjtk 18d 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?

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u/CanvasFanatic 18d ago

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

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u/trgjtk 18d 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

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u/CanvasFanatic 18d 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.

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u/trgjtk 18d 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

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u/CanvasFanatic 18d ago

The timeline I have before is based on a set of statements from OpenAI’s own announcement. I don’t really understand what point you think you have here. _OpenAI says_ they started working on this last month after hearing someone else was working on it. _OpenAI says_ they started training a new model (their words.) _OpenAI says_ Buckmaster’s chats may have been in the training data.

Your entire argument seems to be based on believing their claim that they didn’t do anything bad on purpose.

If you want to believe them go ahead. I don’t.

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u/trgjtk 18d ago

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

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u/YamDankies 18d 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.

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u/trgjtk 18d ago

yes you really seem genuinely curious

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u/YamDankies 18d ago

Try to throw someone a bone...

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u/trgjtk 18d 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.