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Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

cims.nyu.edu

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Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#311

Post by vatsachak »

tstactplsignore wrote: post #310
vatsachak wrote: post #291

This is why I left math even after solving a 20 year old conjecture in grad school. Literally who cares who solved the problem just publish the results. Academia was always politics first results second and I AM GLAD that LLMs are becoming superhuman at math. I like better theorems, not better politics.

Uh but here we have non-academics at for-profit companies playing politics, and the academic they're threatening being kind and overly generous?

In math we have a thing called a "scoop"; another mathematician publishing a result that beats yours before you published it. The scooper hardly acknowledges the scoopee unless the methods used were orthogonal. The scooper gets the good journal and the scoopee's paper is usually one tier below.

It seems like OpenAI heard of the rumor and then scooped them because their internal model is better/they have more compute. OpenAI has NO obligation to mention Tristan nor Levent, because they DID NOT steal their data.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#312

Post by ozgung »

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…

> The entire training data thing is speculation.

I think it's safe to assume AI labs DO train on your data and it's very hard to prevent that.

I've just checked my inaptly named "Help improve our AI models" toggles. The toggle on the Claude settings had magically turned on. I asked about how this can happen. Claude says they show re-consent modals when terms change, and it is a "real and fairly common pattern" to re-opt in without noticing.

All my work and conversations since I don't know are now part of their training corpus. No way to take it back.

Google's Gemini/Antigravity didn't have opt-out toggles at all last time I checked.

Codex also has a separate "include environments" setting which is hard to find (found it in Codex Cloud) and I don't know what it does.

Lots of Dark UI Patterns here even if we assume they keep their promise.

For this incident, Occam's Razor says their internal models somehow saw a version of the mathematicians' logs, during or after training. Maybe indirectly.

These systems are literally designed to collect data. Privacy and safety is not trivial to achieve on the users' side. Simply because it's against the labs' best interest.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#313

Post by colinhb »

sigbottle wrote: post #305
n2d4 wrote: 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's specifically the last two bullet poitns - Tristan is suspicious of the timing, as only few others were trying this approach. OpenAI says the model didn't access his user data directly, but leaves unanswered whether Tristan's chat conversations were part of the training. - OpenAI says they would partially credit Tristan for the $1,000,000 discovery (even though Tristan did not solve the $1,000,000 problem) — but…

I think it's very unlikely that Tristan is making up these quotes, or pulling them out of context:

> 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. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”

Whether and how OpenAI's work on this problem was contaminated by knowledge of Tristan and Levent's work is tangential to OpenAI bullying other researchers into adopting their narrative and dissociating with dis-favored collaborators (ie Levent at Anthropic). Though the latter behavior (threats, intimidation) may weigh against OpenAI in trying to understand the former issue (contamination).

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#314

Post by viccis »

sigbottle wrote: post #305
n2d4 wrote: 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's specifically the last two bullet poitns - Tristan is suspicious of the timing, as only few others were trying this approach. OpenAI says the model didn't access his user data directly, but leaves unanswered whether Tristan's chat conversations were part of the training. - OpenAI says they would partially credit Tristan for the $1,000,000 discovery (even though Tristan did not solve the $1,000,000 problem) — but…

>After hearing of the rumor, OpenAI started researching Navier Stokes with a new internal model.

This is the most suspicious thing to me. If their chat data were available to the corpus to be trained on (I thought they claimed not to do this?) then it really might be as simple as querying the model with "describe recent work from Tristan Buckmaster" and it will spit out this problem and his approach. No need to directly read his user data.

This is basically just scooping, real scumbag behavior.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#315

Post by ryan_n »

lukewarm707 wrote: post #306
n2d4 wrote: 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…

please could you change 'drama' and 'accusation' to something more formal like 'allegation'. the paper makes a very serious allegation of dishonesty and possible academic misconduct. the governance and integrity of openai is of importance to the welfare of society. this is not a matter of drama.

The [lack of] integrity of OpenAI (and any other frontier lab) should already be pretty solidified. Among other horrible things, these companies stole millions of IPs and no one seems to care anymore. Regardless of what you think of the product they are making and the success of ai/its impact on humanity, these companies objectively do not have much integrity.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#316

Post by [deleted] »

modeless wrote: post #252
n2d4 wrote: 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…

> After hearing of the rumor, OpenAI started researching Navier Stokes with a new internal model. I don't think this part is accurate. OpenAI was researching Navier Stokes before. It's possible that they started on a new approach after hearing of Tristan's success, however that is not proven and I expect we will hear OpenAI's side of the story today.

[deleted]

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#317

Post by simonw »

ryan_n wrote: post #315
lukewarm707 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

please could you change 'drama' and 'accusation' to something more formal like 'allegation'. the paper makes a very serious allegation of dishonesty and possible academic misconduct. the governance and integrity of openai is of importance to the welfare of society. this is not a matter of drama.

The [lack of] integrity of OpenAI (and any other frontier lab) should already be pretty solidified. Among other horrible things, these companies stole millions of IPs and no one seems to care anymore. Regardless of what you think of the product they are making and the success of ai/its impact on humanity, these companies objectively do not have much integrity.

How do you feel about the integrity of the machine learning researchers over the past twenty years who trained models on scraped internet data that weren't particularly powerful and didn't attract any attention?

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#318

Post by light_hue_1 »

AJRF wrote: post #62
Semkas wrote: post #57

So, leaving aside the idea that OA might've used data from the researchers Codex sessions: Do I understand correctly that the internal OpenAI work on the problems was probably started after they heard Alpoge and Buckmaster had made process by using their models? And they used the publicly available info about the researchers past work to prompt their models? If compute is cheap, and the difficult thing with scientifi…

> leaving aside the idea that OA might've used data from the researchers Codex sessions Why leave that aside? That is _the_ story. If a Chinese research lab did this we'd call it espionage.

If you think that OpenAI won't look at your data to gain a massive advantage, you're naive.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#319

Post by mswphd »

dash2 wrote: post #46
postalcoder wrote: post #40

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…

openAI's claimed solution uses a model trained in the last 2 weeks. The prior work would definitely be included in the training set.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#320

Post by jawilson2 »

simianwords wrote: post #220
onidj wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> do people really think OpenAI is snooping at people specifically

yes.

Rules and laws are for the poor.

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