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Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

cims.nyu.edu

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Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you find it to be extremely unlikely?

Because very few people actually have access to these logs, all access is monitored and recorded, and improper access will get you fired. It's not worth risking your job over something like this.

If there's one thing I'm absolutely confident in, it's that Sam Altman personally goes to great lengths ensuring that ethical standards are upheld at his company.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine excuses for unknowing plagiarism in this case. What is described in the article seems much more serious: a research program that was only initiated following reports of the author's similar program . In this case no excuses of "I didn't know" can apply, it is not like this revealed some obscure work from the 1980s nobody could reasonably have foreseen. And as far as I can tell this program was only real…

Your comment was greyed out when I saw it earlier, maybe you missed some downvotes? About the plagiarism issue, I model it as OpenAI being an advisor and their AI a PhD student. If the advisor puts their name on a paper behind that of their PhD and it turns out the PhD copied the text of the paper from somewhere else the advisor is also responsible of plagiarism, not just the student. The least the advisor can do is…

I think "greyed out" just means "0 points or less", so if you get 1 downvote without any upvotes it'll be greyed out. For instance your initial reply to me is now greyed out, and I have since observed a few upvotes and downvotes on my original comment (the downvotes apparently from people who aren't willing/able to justify why).

Personally I don't like thinking of LLMs like a PhD student, because most PhD students remember where they learned things from, while LLMs essentially cannot. I think of it a bit more like someone using a search tool carelessly. Although in this case it is apparently more like deliberate misuse than carelessness.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This conclusion is flawed. It's unclear at this point if OpenAI's model or employees actually looked at or stole the author's data. Having worked at large companies before, I'm leaning towards no, since very few employees have access to that data. And simply knowing a problem can be solved is half the battle.

> And simply knowing a problem can be solved is half the battle. Have you done any mathematical research? If not, then no, knowing that a problem is solvable is not “half the battle”. Homework problems are all designed to be solvable, yet they can vary greatly in difficulty. Research mathematics is even more extreme, because, unlike with homework, you don’t know that it is solvable with the extant mathematics, and yo…

You're taking the phrase too literally. The point is that knowing a solution is possible gives you the conviction to actually find that solution. The hardest part of solving a problem is often a lack of conviction to see it through, and quitting too early. Once you know a solution exists, you can commit maximal effort towards solving it and know that your efforts are not in vain.

If not for the rumors that A/ had already solved NS, OAI would likely never have pursued solving the problem with such fervour. The rumors drove OAI to assemble an entire team to crack this.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the drama, when can we expect the lean proof of this great sensational discovery?

> Ignoring the drama But the drama here is a little important. Stealing the millennium prize for N-S is sort of a big deal, especially to those who had been working on it for the last few years.

Attempts to steal $1,000,000 for a solution to Millennium Prize Problem have become a tradition, apparently.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#215
The timeframes don't really fit for Codex logs to be used in training/fine-tuning, do they? This wouldn't be a few-day endeavour? Direct access to Codex history for sure I'd believe, but another (the most?) likely scenario to me feels like OpenAI got wind of these guys' progress, then used their massive infrastructure advantage to throw compute at the problem ahead of them and front-run them. Still has a really bad smell about it though.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#216
post #72
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…

My best guess is that from the perspective of the OpenAI people, Buckmaster was letting his paranoia about OpenAI training tank his opportunity to receive the Clay Prize (it seems like Buckmaster and Alpoge's result isn't quite the full result required for the Clay Prize, whereas apparently OpenAI does have that full result worked out, using the same approach that Buckmaster and Alpoge had been exploring). Whether th…

Buckmaster is already an established world expert at these sorts of problems. Declining the Clay prize would hardly dent his career.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#217

When people worry about OpenAI stealing their chats and reproducing them elsewhere, I usually view the situation as unlikely - since chats are "trained" upon and not necessarily reproduced verbatim, you can assume that unless your chats depict a foundationally new and effective style of communication or ideation, there would be little need or use thereof of training on your chats. For eg: "Hey ChatGPT my name is X an…

Also, if we just take "high-quality" input data, which these chats would certainly be classified as, then the models are more than large enough to memorize everything verbatim. Spitballing some numbers, research literature suggests that LLMs are optimally trained with around 20 training tokens per parameter (fairly confident on this figure), that a DNN parameter encodes around 4 bits of data (less confident here) and I found sources in the 1-4 bits of information per token range (least confident here). So, fairly conservatively I would estimate that a model has the capacity to fully memorize around 5% of its training data, presumably high-quality data is a lot less than that.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#218
post #72
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…

My best guess is that from the perspective of the OpenAI people, Buckmaster was letting his paranoia about OpenAI training tank his opportunity to receive the Clay Prize (it seems like Buckmaster and Alpoge's result isn't quite the full result required for the Clay Prize, whereas apparently OpenAI does have that full result worked out, using the same approach that Buckmaster and Alpoge had been exploring). Whether th…

Can you call paranoia a fear of something which is happening? OpenAI uses user chats for training and they are "open" about it.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Second, you miscomprehended the article. The employee did not "threaten to ruin a prominent researcher's career"… Proceeds to ask removal of another coauthor or else we totally discredit you - phrased as why would you do this to yourself.

Claiming OAI was going to "totally discredit" Buckmaster is baseless.

From the article, it seems OAI wanted to continue discussing the situation with Buckmaster and reach a resolution, but Buckmaster did not want to, declined to respond, and published first.

Also keep in mind we've only heard one side of the story, so any interpretation of events so far is incomplete. There should be a lot more information from OAI's side coming out later today.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#220
post #163
post #83

Drama/accusation summary: - Aug 15th: Tristan Buckmaster & Levent Alpöge make progress on a few important math problems, "finite-time blowup with smooth forcing for incompressible porous media, for Boussinesq, and for 3d incompressible Euler." - they do NOT have a proof for the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize problem. BUT, they do claim to have a proof for a similar (non-Millenium) Navier Stokes problem that could help le…

It seems exceptionally unlikely to me that OpenAI would be "reading user prompts". More likely is a leak somewhere else. Obviously Anthropic/OpenAI are engaged in espionage stuff with each other. I am guessing Levent just mentioned something to someone at Anthropic and it got out.

why is this downvoted? do people really think OpenAI is snooping at people specifically? like they are looking for good leads into new problems or ideas and they found this guy's codex thread and used it? come on man, even for conspiracy theories this is stupid.
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