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.
Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
701–710 of 862 posts
Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
#702People 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.
Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
#703From 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…
Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
#704Earlier quoted context omitted.
We come back to the rule: "The cloud is just someone else's computer". The way for people or companies or universities to control their data and information is to keep it on their own computers.
Solid legal agreements work fine for companies or universities, you just don't usually get that with standard user ToSes.
Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
#705Is 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]
#706Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I am stunned anyone is giving OpenAI the benefit of the doubt
Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
#707Drama/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…
This is sort of a weird interpretation:
> One of the two main persons work at Anthropic and "almost" or "partially" solved the issue, but eventually didn't succeed
- It wasn't an Anthropic endorsed effort.
- Solving this class of problem means a march of progress A -> B -> C -> D. If a student turns in a test that jumps from A -> D without showing any work they're either brilliant or cheating (probably cheating). Further, each step of progress isn't the same proportion of effort. What if moving from C -> D was actually the smallest contribution and just required a novel perspective to make the breakthrough.
This part is wrong:
> An external person with just an excerpt of the chat and certainly less versed in Mathematics (than these 2) tackled the problem.
- it was a whole team at OpenAI working on the problem
- it wasn't a chat excerpt, it was more like their entire git repo and project progress reports
Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
#708Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing that wasn't obvious to me or adults around me when I was younger: most laws define whatever acts a law punishes as individuals commiting to it, not as situations manifesting anyhow. It's not a murder just because someome died hit by a bullet you fired, but you have to have personally decided to kill that person leading to their death[1][2]. OpenAI's LLMs are not humans, and neither is the company. So by thi…
> OpenAI's LLMs are not humans Neither are guns. Which is why we punish the person shooting the gun and not the gun. Industrial equipment, which is how i would classify LLMs, hurting people is nothing new. The relevant questions are: - did someone intend it to happen? - was someone negligent in taking reasonable steps to prevent something foreseeable? The justice system doesn't punish people for legitimate accidents.…
Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
#709>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. If you think these companies are not training on your prompts you are incredibly naive. These models were built by stealing and pirating literally…
My guess is that if you opt out of your data being included then they honour that instruction, but I wouldn't bet my business on it.
Re: Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
#710Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are just overthinking it. This place is now a Claude blog and anti OpenAI site.
My response was not targeted towards Open-AI but towards all closed-source AI companies where your data is used for training and/or is visible to the internal agents whether you want it to or not.
API / enterprise subs tier is default opt out of training. Personal subsidized tier is default opt in with the option to to opt out.
I don't see a grand conspiracy beyond this.