Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#141

Post by contubernio » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 10:41 AM UTC

What is specifically alleged is that a particular approach to the problem - itself not easily discoverable - was copied. This is what is meant in the text "I should say here why I interpreted their statement the way I did, the in- terpretation I will discuss below. The route to the Clay problem through a smooth force, options c and d in Fefferman’s statement of the problem, is the route Luis and Diego opened and the one Levent and I had quietly chosen to attack. Almost nobody else I know of was working on it. It is not the direction one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement. When I heard “forced,” it was a bright red flag."

For those who know nothing about the context - the Diego mentioned was a student of Fefferman and Luis was a student of Diego's - these people have all worked hard on these problems for a long time and are genuine experts. The mathematicians at OpenAI are strong mathematicians, but not expert on these particular problems. The particular approach is claimed to be the key to the whole thing.

The allegation is not different in spirit to alleging that a particular group of astronomical researchers "discovered" a new planet because they had access to the logs of another group that had already pointed its telescope at the planet.

This post is not intended to assess the correctness of the allegation.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#142

Post by alas44 » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 10:44 AM UTC

Sol- wrote: post #131

mayakacz wrote: post #12

I'm not one to comment often but this really pisses me off. OpenAI looked at user data, stole world class researchers' work, and then tried to threaten those researchers to do what would make their corporation profit (which they would anyways!). Imagine you have been working on a terribly difficult math problem for a decade. This is a result you have spent years on, and what you will likely be remembered for. And to…

> OpenAI looked at user data, stole world class researchers' work This doesn't seem to be clear and is very implausible for a large company. Be as cynical as you want, but a normal researcher will simply not have access rights to this data, which will be siloed away somewhere else. It might very well be somewhat unfair to catch wind of a promising approach and then try to frontrun them by throwing compute at the prob…

No, plausible given AI companies want/need session data to train their next models. Probably not someone peeking an eye to sessions directly, but probably not so hard to find the useful sessions in anonymized training data to post train a model on. As stated in the paper, OpenAI did not explicitely denied the researcher sessions were not used for training the model. So either they don't know, or don't want to tell

"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."

Let's see what statement OpenAI will come up with for their side of the story

EDIT: precised my thought on user data vs session data

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#143

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 10:45 AM UTC

tempfile wrote: post #135

ngomez wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Buckmaster says both his and Alpöge's use of Codex was non-institutional, and OpenAI claims the right to train their models on inputs and outputs of non-enterprise users in their service policies [0]. So I'm not sure they were even promised that. [0] https://openai.com/policies/how-your-data-is-used-to-improve...

It isn't relevant whether they were promised that. Indeed I think the assumption must be that they were not promised that, since otherwise the author asking if they were would not make much sense. If OpenAI did use the conversations from Buckmaster and Alpoge, then not disclosing it, explicitly, is plagiarism. If they planned to use that plagiarism to pressure the authors to publish, that is even more unethical. What…

That's absolutely right. Why the downvotes? If OpenAI are using but not acknowledging the work of others that's plagiarism. If they don't know for sure, but aren't performing due dilligence to make sure they aren't, that's also plagiarism.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#144

Post by lhd1 » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 10:50 AM UTC

akersten wrote: post #3

tristanj wrote: post #2

Full mastodon post: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tristanbuckmaster@mastodon.social/11... Mathematical explanation by Terrance Tao: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117233527638291447 It seems there is much background drama behind this, and this is what I've pieced together of what happened: Over the past year, Buckmaster and Alpöge have been using AI to work on fluid dynamics maths problems. Alpöge works at Anthropic, which wi…

> They were coordinating with OpenAI regarding a publishing timeline, but could not come to an agreement, Skimming the PDFs it seems much more dramatic than that? It sounds like at least one of them is concerned OpenAI "solved" the problem by having their internal model use the chats of the independent researchers and want to claim the credit instead? I don't know. The tone is pretty accusational though: > the one Le…

I find the framing a little strange, a sort of David vs Goliath (with his enormous computational resources at his disposal). Since Levent is at Anthropic whose internal models are presumably as capable as anything OpenAI has. So why wasn't Anthropic behind their effort? Why did Tristan use OpenAI's models when it should have been known was a potential outcome? I understand they wanted a normal math collaboration but presumably what Levent brought was his resources (as far as I can see Navier-Stokes is not his speciality). Normally these things are hashed out formally beforehand to avoid the sort of thing now happening.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#145

Post by mishellaneous » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 10:52 AM UTC

tristanj wrote: post #84

dbdr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Buckmaster's text: The route to the Clay problem through a smooth force, options c and d in Fefferman’s statement of the problem, is the route Luis and Diego opened and the one Levent and I had quietly chosen to attack. Almost nobody else I know of was working on it. It is not the direction one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement. When I heard “forced,” it was a bright red flag. This…

That's a stretch. The Luis and Diego paper was published in 2023 and is included in every frontier model's training dataset. An AI model could independently choose the same path route as Luis and Diego, without access to Buckmaster and Alpöge’s work. And the article states "an insane amount of compute had been used," which implies OpenAI brute-forced their way to a solution. I.e. they searched for every paper publish…

> An AI model could independently choose the same path route as Luis and Diego, without access to Buckmaster and Alpöge’s work.

the post you were replying to quotes Buckmaster specifically denying this: "It is not the direction one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement."

> And the article states "an insane amount of compute had been used," which implies OpenAI brute-forced their way to a solution. I.e. they searched for every paper published on Navier-Stokes and exhaustively attempted every approach. Such an approach would lead them to a solution.

"implies" is a surprising choice of word here. that's certainly one interpretation of "an insane amount of compute had been used". what came to my mind, considering Buckmaster's statement that the AI would not head down this specific path on its own, is, though, that they prompted it in this specific direction and then used an insane amount of compute. this seems consistent as well with these other statements:

> Over the course of the call, as members of their team sent Sebastien corrections and details over their internal chat, it emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem, that this was one of a number of things that was tried, that work had started on the unforced problem, that the team first set the model on easier problems, including Euler (...)

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#146

Post by paxys » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 10:54 AM UTC

postalcoder wrote: post #40

mayakacz wrote: post #12

I'm not one to comment often but this really pisses me off. OpenAI looked at user data, stole world class researchers' work, and then tried to threaten those researchers to do what would make their corporation profit (which they would anyways!). Imagine you have been working on a terribly difficult math problem for a decade. This is a result you have spent years on, and what you will likely be remembered for. And to…

I'm stunned that people are taking this accusation as a fact. OpenAI is no stranger to rivalry with Anthropic but 1. it's not like user data is sitting around on some kitchen table somewhere and 2. I consider OpenAI to be as economically motivated as any other actor in this space and playing around with user data like that would destroy their business. There are things that Buckmaster alleged and things that he specu…

This is how internet discourse works on Reddit/Twitter/HN and the rest. Someone said something which confirms your biases so it’ll now be treated as a fact and repeated endlessly in the echo chamber.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#147

Post by tristanj » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 10:55 AM UTC

calf wrote: post #117

famouswaffles wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be so hard to explain? That OpenAI heard about the result and decided to throw a lot of money at it knowing it was within reach ? That the model took an approach that was published years ago ?

That's a fake explanation, it skips explaining/justifying how OpenAi "heard about" the result

The rumors that Anthropic had solved a millennium problem were absolutely everywhere last week. I'm not surprised at all that OAI took their own stab at it.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#148

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 10:55 AM UTC

Traster wrote: post #101

dash2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't even make that accusation! > 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. The shocking/interesting thing would be if it was trained on the sessions. I think it's very implausible tha…

Parse that statement more carefully. > I was told the model did not look up user data. The naive way to read this is "Nothing you guys did influenced the way our model got to the solution". The less naive way to read this is "Of course the model isn't looking up your user data. I (the guy trying to blackmail you to remove the Anthropic employee from credit on your paper) looked up your sessions, and tipped our model…

Duh. There are supposed to be limits to what OpenAI is allowed to access with respect to logs and user interactions but there is no technical limitation.

It's a bit like sending unencrypted messages through a messaging app and the developer having a TOS that says they don't look at your messages. They might not, but they are fully capable of doing so. If they have a reason to do it, they will. Nobody's stopping them.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#149

Post by paxys » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 10:57 AM UTC

Recursing wrote: post #103

traes wrote: post #59

The accused Sebastian Bubeck has denied the allegations on Twitter[0], and various other OpenAI employees[1,2] seem to be mocking another Anthropic employee voicing support for Levent[3]? Things are getting messy. [0] https://xcancel.com/SebastienBubeck/status/20972141224714323... [1] https://xcancel.com/polynoamial/status/2097215233119211902 [2] https://xcancel.com/danintheory/status/2097214838003138603 [3] https://…

Wow this is just bullying, it's insane that we are letting these people be in charge of the transition

So someone can make public accusations of theft against you and if you publicly reply denying it you’re the bully?

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#150

Post by redox99 » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 10:58 AM UTC

martijn_himself wrote: post #108

Can somebody explain: do singularities / blow-ups in solutions have any relation to physical phenomena in fluid dynamics or are they purely artifacts of how the N-S equations may not accurately describe what actually happens in the physical world?

Yes and no. It means the system is pushed away from a macroscopic theory into one where molecular effects matter. So it's not that you'd get infinite velocities in the real world, but you might get significant real world behavior that is not described by the macroscopic theory.