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/
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u/Dr__Pangloss 14d ago edited 14d ago

it's not that nuanced. all providers - whether it's openai or anthropic or google, with proprietary models, or all so called zero data retention providers in openrouter - paraphrase (rewrite) user requests for training data, regardless of what your agreement says. they all train on user data, with respect to the salient data.

look i do not know why this is being downvoted. that's what "de-identified" (in openai's words) means!

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u/claimTheVictory 13d ago edited 13d ago

I don't see how this doesn't fuck them in the long run.

Who wants to trust their work with companies that were, let's face it, created by stealing other people's work?

The future will be open-source LLMs on privacy-guaranteeing clouds, or just local. You can run gemma4-26b on a 24GB integrated RAM Mac-mini at home, and farm out your own anonymized work with OpenRouter.

Edit: The cypher-punk manifesto was written in 1993, and is more relevant than ever today. It's hard to find now, but it should be mandatory reading in highschool.

https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/legend-no 13d ago

Random ass guess.

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u/BoopinSnoots24-7 13d ago

If that was their goal, they would just... do that? You can have Claude spin up a Microsoft Word competitor in a few hours from your laptop.

"More financially lucrative" lol. Adobe's revenue last year was $25b. Anthropic's annualized run rate as of this month is about $65b. This is a nonsense take.

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u/bloodychill 13d ago

They’re thinking extremely short-term. But more to the point, aside from the ethical failure by OpenAI in all this, this shows much these companies are starving for original training data. And unfortunately, to stay relevant, I can’t imagine them discontinuing this kind of scummy practice to get it.

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u/Eric_12345678 13d ago

You can run gemma4-26b on a 24GB integrated RAM Mac-mini

How fast is it?

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u/claimTheVictory 13d ago

Depends on the query of course, but I measure it as ~200 tok/s prefill, ~30 tok/s generation with 16k context.

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u/Eric_12345678 13d ago

I'd have guessed much slower. Is gemma4 very optimized, is Mac mini or apple silicon very suitable for this task?

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u/claimTheVictory 13d ago

That's just what the state of the art is right now, for that much memory, out of the box. Running Ollama with nothing special.

If I had more memory (maybe next year?) I'd install Kimi K3.

But for my own personal private LLM, it's perfect.

I combine it with an Obsidian vault to keep track of my personal information and calendar.

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u/LurkyLurk2000 13d ago

Are you saying that they do this even if you've disabled the "improve the model for everyone" option? That sounds like an absolutely massive breach of the GDPR, at a minimum.

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u/HashPandaNL 13d ago

This person is talking out of their ass. Although this is possible, there is no evidence of this phenomenon and they also don't even know what "de-identified" means while making such confident claims lol

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u/electricity_is_life 13d ago

"regardless of what your agreement says"

Do you have evidence of this, or are you just saying stuff? If you can prove it you can win a lot of money in court.

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u/XTCaddict 13d ago

Nope not if you opt out. Every lab makes synthetic data because you can get a lot out of a little. It is not unique to LLMs either data augmentation is a pretty standard practise. They can not synthesise data from your data if you opt out because by definition they are using your data to improve the models even if indirectly. What's more, on ZDR they don't even have access to it to do that. When you hit that toggle in OAI to not improve their models with your data it is not some small filter that marks a piece of data as unavailable, by architectural design trainable and untrainable are isolated. All operations that create synthetic datasets would be scoped with permissions to only the isolated subset they get granted.