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Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

cims.nyu.edu

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Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#551

Post by spongebobstoes »

rakejake wrote: post #327
viccis wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 direc…

OAI doesn't need to mention Buckmaster's name directly in a prompt. They just need to select a basket of sessions that is guaranteed to contain Buckmaster's and then direct the LLM to attack only a specific method/angle. This is trivial to do while maintaining plausible deniability about not using his work.

what reason do we have to believe that they did this? both things were proved by AI, isn't it logical that they could have very similar approaches?

it is common that multiple people essentially simultaneously prove/invent the same thing

I see zero evidence of wrongdoing

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#552

Post by tomcorrigan »

tristanj wrote: post #219
garyfirestorm wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Also keep in mind we've only heard one side of the story, so any interpretation of events so far is incomplete.

That’s not quite true though is it. OpenAI is fortunate enough to have one of its employees (you) here to advocate for its side of the story.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#553

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#554

Post by [deleted] »

mishellaneous wrote: post #145
tristanj wrote: post #84

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…

[deleted]

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#555

Post by fc417fc802 »

fn-mote wrote: post #535
fc417fc802 wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the professor voluntarily provided the notes in this analogy. I think the student would also be expected to cite the textbook if building off of it directly. In contrast, humans are generally not expected to cite "general inspiration" or what have you. So if we're to apply human standards, and assuming that the model was trained on the relevant work, it would only be plagiarism if the model directly built…

To be clear, the accusation is that they trained on the chats they used while working on the problem. Not published work or even a preprint. Your post does not distinguish, and it matters.

How does it matter? It either is or is not plagiarism. Ripping off a published textbook isn't somehow better than ripping off private correspondence. Both are serious acts of academic misconduct on account of the part where you knowingly and intentionally portrayed someone else's work as your own.

Note that I am not taking a stance on what openai allegedly did or did not do one way or the other. I am merely pointing out what I see as a fatal flaw in the line of argument presented by the earlier commenter - the idea that training on an item is on its own sufficient to establish plagiarism of it.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#556

Post by djokkataja »

fn-mote wrote: post #530
adastra22 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did we read the same tweet? It felt very forthright and level-headed to me. Not at all what I expected.

> Anthropic models had been used in their proof of Euler blowup; I therefore felt I could not consider Levent to be an independent academic So using someone’s models makes someone who works for the competitor not “independent”? When their coauthor is? What does that even mean? I almost stopped reading this extra long post entirely at that point. This is not a good look in my book.

The first part of the sentence is important:

> Importantly it was admitted that internal Anthropic models had been used in their proof of Euler blowup; I therefore felt I could not consider Levent to be an independent academic.

If an Anthropic employee is doing independent research, but with models that aren't available to the public (because they're internal models), then . . . idk. It's not clear to me why that should necessarily require a refusal to cooperate between OpenAI and Anthropic employees who are excited about solving a problem like this.

For me, the bigger question here is what "internal models" means to these employees, especially in the context of the OpenAI employees repeatedly avoiding directly answering whether their model had been trained on Tristan's and Levent's ongoing work on the problem. It had always seemed like a loophole that AI companies might be tempted to exploit: yeah, they can say that they won't train on your data, but if an AI company doesn't care about ethics, they might go ahead and train a model for internal use only on everyone's data anyway, just to have as much data as possible and potentially gain an advantage in what the company can internally do. They could never publicly release any versions of a model like that, of course. And of course this is speculation.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#557

Post by fc417fc802 »

anonymousDan wrote: post #517
fc417fc802 wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the professor voluntarily provided the notes in this analogy. I think the student would also be expected to cite the textbook if building off of it directly. In contrast, humans are generally not expected to cite "general inspiration" or what have you. So if we're to apply human standards, and assuming that the model was trained on the relevant work, it would only be plagiarism if the model directly built…

This is just a nonsense line of reasoning. Training based on the solution to the problem (or the key insight behind the problem) is clearly a form of plagiarism.

What about my line of reasoning is nonsense? I made no claim either in support of or contrary to yours. Rather I pointed out that by this logic literally everything that an LLM spits out is plagiarism of the vast majority of the entire body of human literature in existence. Can you offer meaningful refutation of that observation of mine?

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#558

Post by applicative »

m00x wrote: post #538
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…

I haven't seen any proof that OpenAI asked Tristan to remove Sebastian from the prize. Until we have proof of this, it would be wise to offer conclusions. Same for NS validity. This was not validated by the community yet.

you can read it in buckmaster's document.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#559

Post by fc417fc802 »

hellohello2 wrote: post #540
fc417fc802 wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic everything any LLM spits out is plagiarizing the vast majority of work written prior to a few months ago. That doesn't seem like a useful or desirable line of argument to me.

This is a common misconception, so its understandable that you have it. Generative models can both plagiarize and generalize. The question here is which of the two happened.

A needlessly condescending tone while failing to address the topic at hand. The person I replied to advanced the claim that training was sufficient to constitute plagiarism. You appear to be claiming that it is possible to generalize instead of plagiarize after training on something, so I take it that you must necessarily disagree with the original claim?

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#560

Post by vlovich123 »

scott_weber wrote: post #543
vlovich123 wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it's so easy to tell whether a given piece of data was in a training run at their scale. It's entirely possible they think the answer is no, but on the off-chance that it could be, they'd rather not say no and then later it turns out they did and then they're claimed to be lying. If you were them, unless you could 100% rule it out, you'd hedge and say you can't.

It should be quite easy: if they don't leak the user session data publicly, and don't commingle it with training data internally, how could it possibly end up in the training data? What surprises me is they're not more boldly/plainly lying about it.

Unless they know exactly the researcher’s account, they may not know in their end if he had the setting to let them train on his chat logs. They also probably don’t know if he had any correspondence on any forum where he may have discussed this and it got picked up by scrapers.

I’m not saying they didn’t do anything unethical. I’m just saying even if they were ethical, there’s plenty of practical reasons at their scale why a flat out denial is logistically difficult to do

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