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Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

cims.nyu.edu

151–160 of 872 posts

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#151
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

>> Does openAI train on user conversations in general? I assume so. But so fast as that? That seems unlikely in general. I expect OpenAI will come out denying this.

How "fast" does it have to be? Buckmaster and Alpoge have been working on this for just a day short of a year. See Alpoge's tweet announcing his collaboration with Bukmaster dated 9/19/25:

https://x.com/__alpoge__/status/2097206973418611054

It takes a few months to train a model these days but not a whole year. OpenAI had all the time to train on Buckmaster and Alpoge's results of just a few months earlier at which point they must have been well on the path to their result.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also full of your posts baselessly defending OpenAI. Maybe you should also heed your own advice?

I've been right historically, check my track record. How about you?

Lt. Dan doesn't even have legs and he still does alright on the jump to conclusions mat

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#154
This is the plot of 3 Body Problem, the Dark Forest. You need to hide yourself (the problem you are working on) or the super advanced aliens will obliterate you (start working on your problem) the moment they know you exist (rumors the problem is amendable to LLMs).

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't be shocking at all. They stole human data to train the first models and they've been stealing it ever since to train new models. Stealing mathematicians private chats and private research and taking credit for it would absolutely be par for the course. Enterprises are well aware of it and are fully on board. You didn't think every corporation in America has an OpenAI subscription because the models were g…

They are not training a whole model in a matter of days

pretraining is months but they can totally fine tune in a few days

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#156
post #131

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…

They likely train on logs.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#157

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…

[dead]

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

> "It is not the direction one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement."

Can they back up this statement somehow?

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#160
post #17

> It was also said that if OpenAI posted after us, they would say that we deserved the Clay Prize, and that we were the “closest humans to the problem”. I declined both offers. I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. T…

I think this should be in the title of the post. 'OpenAI allegedly threatening to ruin a prominent researcher's career', or smth like that.

There's some glaring mistakes in your framing.

First, this is an unnamed OpenAI employee speaking, not OpenAI the organization.

Second, you miscomprehended the article. The employee did not "threaten to ruin a prominent researcher's career". The actual quote is "Why would you ruin your career?", which implies the researcher would damage their own career, i.e. via self-sabotage.

Then the actual "threat" is "If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice” which is an entirely different statement.

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