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Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

cims.nyu.edu

671–680 of 867 posts

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn’t this very capable model they’ve developed be able to identify promising problems? That’s what I’d expect from how the model is being presented and advertised.

That's more or less what they did according to their announcement. They fired it at a whole bunch of high end math problems and merely concentrated all efforts on one after it made some promising progress.

It seems like that’s the opposite of what happened. They started attacking the problem when they got a wind of a possible solution from certain individuals.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds like a great time for open mathematical research is upon us. /s

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#673
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.

Sama himself has now confirmed OpenAI started researching NS after the rumor.

"It is true that we tried this because there were rumors on the internet last week that Anthropic's models had solved a millennium problem and we were curious if ours could do it too."

https://xcancel.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is knowledge, freely given to the world Even if you’re starting from a position that credit for a discovery literally can’t be stolen, that still doesn’t resolve in OpenAI’s favor here.

it seems like OAI tried to share, but didn't want to share with an Ant employee. a bit childish, but understandable to want to avoid a headline "Anthropic researcher solves Millennium problem" it seems like Buckmaster got one-upped and is upset. understandable, but I find their reaction childish as well

> OAI tried to share, but didn't want to share with an Ant employee

Why does OpenAI get to dictate who Buckmaster can claim co-authorship with?

> I find their reaction childish

OpenAI may have, with full plausible deniability, taken Buckmaster’s work and passed it off—in substantial part—as their own. (Fitting into a fact pattern of them having tried to do the same with Apple.)

There is a material takeaway for anyone who does creative or otherwise unique work from this. (Which is unfortunate. Whatever happened here, AI clearly accelerated the discovery process.) For anyone else, I agree it’s just drama.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's exactly the argument of the people calling it plagiarism machines. No-one ever really did refute it there was just a bunch of settlements for elite institutions so they weren't left empty handed like the various small time creators/authors etc were.

I think the bigger issue here is this feels like some PR smoothing happening that after all the work that went into "it's safe to use for enterprises" now we have what looks like openAI using private user data to scoop novel research and the question of why couldn't they do it for an enterprise with much more money on the line.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#676

From OpenAI: > While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models This is the crux of it. If Tristan's work and insights were not used to train OpenAI models, then this just looks like a case of hyper-competitive academic sniping that has been going on for decades (check out Watson and Crick!) accelerated by AI as a tool. The fact that this is…

what about watson and crick ?

I thought they worked together.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#677
Is this being astroturfed?

Like, to me this looks like academic slap-fighting from Bubeck and Levent. People working at OpenAI are saying, "hey, we don't have that particular data in our models," others are saying, "we used a different approach to do it with Navier-Stokes" this feels like much ado about nothing.

Then in these comments I see some wild accusations.

If OpenAI is telling the truth (I don't really see a reason to lie here, if anything that sounds kind of like a dumb idea given the context), then they heard, "oh, shit, someone might be able to solve Navier-Stokes, don't we have some guys working on that? Give them 10,000 agents!" Then 88 hours later, out pops a similar solution. It's not like there's probably an infinity of ways to do this, the proof is probably similar.

Read this:

> 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.

So, really, it sounds like academic slap-fighting nonsense and corporate bureaucracy. Literally, OpenAI's best move would have been to say, "ok, we're going to not say anything, do your thing" and let it happen. Ego and vanity got in the way.

Still, the stupid drama of this doesn't really do the results justice. There are maybe 1000 people on planet earth who are qualified to solve a problem like this. Even if the human "loosened the jar" a bit, that's astounding that their model was able to figure it the rest of the way out. Why are people dialed in to the human interest story here and not looking at the bigger picture!

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#678

People here do not seem to be considering the second-order effects of these series of events. No academic institution or enterprise will trust OpenAI, Anthropic or any other non-local AI model with their core IP. There will be severe restrictions on what employees at these companies/institutions can share with AI services even from their personal accounts. (Or I am just overthinking it)

i dont trust academics to not be dumb idiots. hes working with ant but using gpt. and then he cries foul? i cry dumb first

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

What a horrible response from Bubeck. How did he think that would make him and OpenAI look good to tweet that?

I especially loved the part where he claims they spent $60m on compute to push on N-S because of a Twitter rumor, and they totally didn't steal the idea from mathematicians using their tools.
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