351–360 of 866 posts
OpenAI's statement: We congratulate Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster on their remarkable mathematical work. We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem. While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped i…
Bubeck's statement https://xcancel.com/SebastienBubeck/status/20973794116915163...
Where his tone is obviously corporate speak. "We heard rumours so we though we might give it a try, too!" as if (1) it wasn't FOMO that drove that decision and (2) perhaps that urgency would be a source of clouded judgment.
Not sure who I believe now, but it does seem like Buckmaster is just upset that NS is solved and not be his side.
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> But Tristan rejects the first, why? Because he thinks it's theft? But then why would OAI threaten him? Did the first offer also come with the outrageous condition that he exclude his co-author from the credit?
But i don't understand what OAI is offering in the first offer to allow them to believe they can demand that? Not publishing before Tristan? If they really beat Tristan to the publication i would consider it truly morally corrupt conduct so i feel like you can't make an offer like if you give me something i won't be totally corrupt
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If they scraped internet data in the same way as current day frontier labs do, then I feel the same exact way about them. Why would I feel any different if that is the case?
My point is that researchers and academics really have been doing this for decades - it's the reason projects like Common Crawl and LAION exist. I think it's notable that nobody was calling out those researchers for their lack of integrity, because the systems they were building did not seem like a threat to anyone. OpenAI etc get accused of a lack of integrity on this precisely because the systems they are building…
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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…
This is how deniable threats work. The promise of "not being nice" in conjunction with "ruining the career" is as clear a threat as there can be in writing.
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Thanks. I was pinging some people near the mentioned Córdoba to see if they had any insights, but no extra info yet...
You should call El Niño, he lives close to the Mexican border and is at home after 6...
"Mr A. Nino weathers a storm of protest" - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/mr-a-nino-weathers-a-stor...
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If they scraped internet data in the same way as current day frontier labs do, then I feel the same exact way about them. Why would I feel any different if that is the case?
My point is that researchers and academics really have been doing this for decades - it's the reason projects like Common Crawl and LAION exist. I think it's notable that nobody was calling out those researchers for their lack of integrity, because the systems they were building did not seem like a threat to anyone. OpenAI etc get accused of a lack of integrity on this precisely because the systems they are building…
Then you have OpenAI etc.. who build these multi-billion (trillion??) dollar machines and sell them back to people, using everyone's proprietary data, and (among other things) tell everyone it's going to take their jobs. That combination of things doesn't scream integrity to me.
Still, it's undeniable that these machines could be beneficial for humanity (cancer research and such). So, I'm sure many people would say the good out-ways the bad. I don't know. Seems that would set a risky precedent for future companies, but maybe not.
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>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.” If this is true he should release the actual emails. This is a very serious accusation and he sho…
> If this is true he should release the actual emails these were statements while on a call, and at least the career comment Bubeck has admitted to while doing damage control ("I deeply apologize for this extremely poor choice of words, it is the opposite of what I was trying to convey. (I should say that I retracted them on the spot by the way.)"[1]). [1] https://xcancel.com/SebastienBubeck/status/20973794116915163.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My point is that researchers and academics really have been doing this for decades - it's the reason projects like Common Crawl and LAION exist. I think it's notable that nobody was calling out those researchers for their lack of integrity, because the systems they were building did not seem like a threat to anyone. OpenAI etc get accused of a lack of integrity on this precisely because the systems they are building…
you massively collapsed what AI companies have been doing by comparing it to old internet-scraping. Facebook flat-out admitted that they scanned copyrighted books for their AI. The image generators most definitely trained on copyrighted images.
OpenAI et al also stole everything from everyone. But then they raised billions of dollars from that data and sell back their LLM to people (again, among other things). They are also very much NOT open in any way, aside from sharing their benchmarks of new models.
> I asked when the first prompt had been sent by them. This question was not answered directly by OpenAI for some time. Eventually it was agreed that it had been sent in the past few days, after information about our work had reached OpenAI.
> 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.
> Two proposals were offered to me. The first was that we post our Euler result, and that OpenAI post its Navier-Stokes result the next day. The second was that, after posting Euler, I alone write a paper presenting the Navier-Stokes result, acknowledging that an internal OpenAI model had resolved it. Sebastien twice asserted that he wanted Levent removed from authorship, and said it would all be simple if only it were not the case that, and it was so annoying that, Levent works at Anthropic. 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. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”
Wow, that's some VERY friendly communication. Besides, will the career of the person be ruined because of “Why would you ruin your career?” came out of his or her own mouth?