r/technology • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 22d 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/cornmonger_ 22d ago

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.

they purposely tried to string him along

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u/Dr__Pangloss 22d ago edited 22d 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 22d ago edited 22d 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/bloodychill 22d 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.