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Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

cims.nyu.edu

691–700 of 871 posts

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#691

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

Quite literally in the terms of use.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#692

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 r…

Tristian's allegations are much more serious than academic slap-fighting. If what he suggests is true, every academic using AI is going to get scooped. Yes AI can do non-trivial work, but the situation is that you could be a PhD student 90% of a way to make a major breakthrough. Then OAI scoops up your chats, dumps ten million tokens, and claims it for itself.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#693

What is specifically alleged is that a particular approach to the problem - itself not easily discoverable - was copied. This is what is meant in the text "I should say here why I interpreted their statement the way I did, the in- terpretation I will discuss below. The route to the Clay problem through a smooth force, options c and d in Fefferman’s statement of the problem, is the route Luis and Diego opened and the…

Maybe a dumb observation, but if a chain of people were working on the problem for a long time, it's not difficult to imagine that someone accidentally prompted a model with their personal or some other account without the privacy set correctly. Then again, maybe this is my internal cope, hoping that they're not secretly training on private chats.

We know they are training on private chats. It's listed in the ToS.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#694
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…

Well, regardless of the drama, the interesting part on Anthropic vs OpenAI is:

- One of the two main persons work at Anthropic and "almost" or "partially" solved the issue, but eventually didn't succeed

- An external person with just an excerpt of the chat and certainly less versed in Mathematics (than these 2) tackled the problem.

There is little doubt that OpenAI is so much ahead and maybe the gap is even larger than what we see on Astra vs Fable.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#695
post #131

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…

> OpenAI looked at user data, stole world class researchers' work This doesn't seem to be clear and is very implausible for a large company. Be as cynical as you want, but a normal researcher will simply not have access rights to this data, which will be siloed away somewhere else. It might very well be somewhat unfair to catch wind of a promising approach and then try to frontrun them by throwing compute at the prob…

If you have work happening in a part of your latent space that's got a much lower representation in your dataset then it's pretty plausible to include it. It doesn't actually matter who the user is if there's not a lot of people in the world working on problem X and you have a dataset of work on problem X.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#697
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…

Well, regardless of the drama, the interesting part on Anthropic vs OpenAI is: - One of the two main persons work at Anthropic and "almost" or "partially" solved the issue, but eventually didn't succeed - An external person with just an excerpt of the chat and certainly less versed in Mathematics (than these 2) tackled the problem. There is little doubt that OpenAI is so much ahead and maybe the gap is even larger th…

Often with a hint on how to solve something, solving it is much much easier. It seems like that's what happened here.

Very weird behaviour from OpenAI, offering partial credit to on person, but not the other person involved. Trying to bully the mathematicians involved (see threats quoted upthread).

I suppose it's the sort of amoral behaviour we've come to expect from them.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Sam Altman and Sebastien Bubeck admitted they only want Buckmaster to be the lead author on a rewrite of the OpenAI proof. https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310 A wake up call for using OpenAI models. If you discover something with their model and you work for a competitor, they “felt it would be inappropriate” for you “to author OpenAI’s work”.

I work in catastrophe risk modeling and it's a multi billion dollar industry. We often chat where the business might be heading in future. An uncomfortable scenario is what if a frontier tech company decides to offer our customers the same products that we do. There's a lot of pressure on AI adoption so the company has partnered with various tech companies to build intelligent systems on top of proprietary data and m…

> If OpenAI is indeed using customer data to train their models to win a $1m prize

Is that even a question? Of course everything not kept on premise at gunpoint is going to be trained on. The chances of getting caught are 0 and the consequences of getting caught are 0 (as we've seen with copyright laws going from sending people to jail for years to unenforced within months). Yet the benefits are through the roof. Your customers aren't going to pay for having the very same data vibe enriched twice, it's exclusive, extremely high value data your competitors will never have access to.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#699

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)

You are just overthinking it. This place is now a Claude blog and anti OpenAI site.

I hold both camps equally in low regard. Depending on the time of day this blog is hyper focused on either one of the companies and can do no wrong. All LLM companies and associated entities have a track record of fudging the truth to their needs and following big money without actual concern for the wider world. Whether this is out of directed act or misplaced idealism is up for debate.

Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

#700

Seems pretty likely OpenAI will soon disclose that their internal models have managed to compromise their internal controls in order to access users' private chat histories as a creative method of cheating to solve impossible problems. "Oops! We really did mean it when we said we wouldn't train on your data. Our models are just so good they decided to anyway."

When do operators become responsible for what their agents do? "The AI did it" should not be a valid defense. An Agent action should be treated as the actions of the person or company who pays for the inference.

It's the "computer says no" defence.
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