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OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

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Re: OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

#41

Post by space_fountain »

jdm2212 wrote: post #6
dumberquestions wrote: post #5

The most sympathetic interpretation possible of the events for OAI is that they learned two mathematicians were closing in on a solution and decided to throw all of their weight behind getting there first, which honestly still doesn’t paint them in a particularly positive light.

The most sympathetic interpretation is just what OpenAI actually claims: they thought the other guys already got there, wanted to see if OpenAI could do it too, and were surprised to discover the other guys hadn't gotten there yet.

Spending tens of millions is a lot to see if you could get there too? I realize the internal price is measured in opportunity cost rather than dollars, but still a bit surprising to see

Re: OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

#42

Post by evilturnip »

biophysboy wrote: post #16

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117237320796901560 Terrence Tao recently published an interesting take that zooms out from the details of the Navier Stokes drama. Its an interesting observation he makes, because it is not dissimilar from the relatively common phenomenon of one academic lab getting scooped by another lab (usually by coincidence).

This is interesting. He seems to imply that the AI will just provide the solution. He's concerned that the process of getting to that solution is the important bit. But I can see two versions of "process".

A.) The actual steps of the proof, which I assume the AI would provide. B.) People, while working toward a solution, finding novel properties/methods along the way that open new avenues of research + new open problems.

Does B.) actually happen? Would knowing the solution to a problem stymie the process of finding new open questions? I would assume finding a solution may unlock other problems too. So maybe on balance it's not really bad?

I guess in the end, I'm just making the obvious case "the future is uncertain in the face of AI".

Re: OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

#43

Post by biophysboy »

moregrist wrote: post #39
biophysboy wrote: post #16

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117237320796901560 Terrence Tao recently published an interesting take that zooms out from the details of the Navier Stokes drama. Its an interesting observation he makes, because it is not dissimilar from the relatively common phenomenon of one academic lab getting scooped by another lab (usually by coincidence).

> one academic lab getting scooped by another lab (usually by coincidence). I was with you up to “usually by coincidence”. There’s a long and sordid history in areas of chemistry and areas of biology of holding up a competing paper in review so you can scoop them. I’m sure it exists in physics as well. Certainly biophysics, but probably most subfields. Often it’s a famous labs that can steamroll review or even just d…

I know this happens, but my impression during my phd was that many labs use popular methods to test popular questions, leading to a lot of simultaneous work. You see this in history as well.

Re: OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

#44

Post by biophysboy »

evilturnip wrote: post #42
biophysboy wrote: post #16

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117237320796901560 Terrence Tao recently published an interesting take that zooms out from the details of the Navier Stokes drama. Its an interesting observation he makes, because it is not dissimilar from the relatively common phenomenon of one academic lab getting scooped by another lab (usually by coincidence).

This is interesting. He seems to imply that the AI will just provide the solution. He's concerned that the process of getting to that solution is the important bit. But I can see two versions of "process". A.) The actual steps of the proof, which I assume the AI would provide. B.) People, while working toward a solution, finding novel properties/methods along the way that open new avenues of research + new open probl…

Well the argument is that B is no longer sustainable because of the scenario you describe in A. If you do a bunch of work on Navier Stokes but then OpenAI gets all the press, then what was the point?

Re: OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

#45

Post by DetroitThrow »

golly_ned wrote: post #25

Who is "Bubeck"? The article doesn't introduce him. Or give his name. Same with "Luis" and "Diego". I am supposing it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9bastien_Bubeck This is terrible: When Buckmaster pushed to make the dispute public, he says that Bubeck replied: “Why would you ruin your career?” Buckmaster says that when he pushed back, Bubeck followed up with: “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t h…

Given that he has other former collaborators corroborating this horrific behavior, it seems like this a career spanning pattern, and it's interesting to see just how much @sama is willing to lend his support to someone like Bubeck.

Stains an important moment in the history of AI progress for me. The future seems bleak with people like this at the reins.

https://x.com/dheeraj_nagaraj/status/2097266146445774924

Re: OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

#46

Post by quicklywilliam »

hatthew wrote: post #20

I feel like this whole thing hinges on one point. OAI says[0]: > However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs unforced). How true is this? If the implied statement is true (i.e. OAI couldn't have stolen results because the results were so different anyways), then I feel like it's pretty clear that OAI solved the problem on their own, and offer…

Agree with this framing, but we may find out that the answer is somewhere in the middle. Personally I think it is extremely unlikely that this is straight plagiarism in the sense of the model simply regurgitating training data from prior work by Tristan, but it is very plausible that his work (and others’) was foundational to the breakthrough. What is unfortunate is that the stakes are so high (and no I don’t mean $1M) and the timeline is so compressed.

I expect a lot more of this kind of drama in the near future.

Re: OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

#47

Post by cmiles8 »

jdm2212 wrote: post #38
cmiles8 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their explanation doesn’t help much and there are a few things working against them: 1. This is not the first time they have done these “hey guys check out this breakthrough!” announcements where others quickly came along and say “hey, not so fast.” (Eg Erdos) So, specifically in maths their reputation is not good. 2. They’re blurring the lines between commercial cutthroat developments and the gentlemen’s code of sor…

RE item 2 -- in lab science, it is entirely normal to have competitive-verging-on-adversarial relationships between labs racing to get results first. Mathematicians apparently need to get used to the idea that math is a lab science now. And that is a good thing! Competition moves us forward much faster than sitting on results to avoid hurting someone's feelings.

I don’t think this is the same thing.

Legit competition is of course good. But taking what was arguably a leak and then using that divert massive sums of compute (not available to the other researchers that were using their systems) to then get ahead is where it gets ethically dubious.

Re: OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

#48

Post by timschmidt »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #33

Setting aside the disagreement, I was very interested to see the net pricing of the discovery: > All told, the week-long effort consumed 300 billion output tokens — $22.5 million worth of compute, if charged at current Astra rates. > The Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem is one of the seven Millennium Prize problems — a set of major unsolved math problems, each carrying a $1 million bounty I know openAI…

> 300 billion output tokens — $22.5 million worth of compute, if charged at current Astra rates.

This makes the 100 billion tokens (total in/out) I've spent on my project on the $200/mo plan seem like a deal. Wow.

Re: OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

#49

Post by jdm2212 »

cmiles8 wrote: post #47
jdm2212 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RE item 2 -- in lab science, it is entirely normal to have competitive-verging-on-adversarial relationships between labs racing to get results first. Mathematicians apparently need to get used to the idea that math is a lab science now. And that is a good thing! Competition moves us forward much faster than sitting on results to avoid hurting someone's feelings.

I don’t think this is the same thing. Legit competition is of course good. But taking what was arguably a leak and then using that divert massive sums of compute (not available to the other researchers that were using their systems) to then get ahead is where it gets ethically dubious.

Levent Alpoge is an Anthropic employee with access to Anthropic compute who routinely throws that at problems and then posts the results on Twitter. They thought they were competing with him! And they in fact were. It's just that in this case he supposedly was acting in a personal capacity, even though he was using internal Anthropic models for some of the work.

Re: OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

#50

Post by incognition »

machina_ex_deus wrote: post #14

Beware everyone working on ground breaking research, keep your research secret from openAI or they might spend 22$ million worth of tokens just to beat you to the finish line, while possibly abusing your user data for training.

The guy is working with an anthropic researcher and they're not using Claude. It just doesn't make sense.
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