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Mathematicians want proof OpenAI didn't use their work

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Re: Mathematicians want proof OpenAI didn't use their work

#61

Post by red75prime »

fractorial wrote: post #16
trescenzi wrote: post #2

If I understand correctly OpenAI cannot provide it. Because the models are essentially black boxes, especially this far after the fact, determining if this result built on training data based on conversations about the problem is impossible. So unless they can prove those conversations were never used for training then there’s no way to know.

Only under gross negligence would it be unprovable: Did you use a model whose training set included user data? Did the transcripts of any of the agents include a tool call whose result including user data?

Or under strict privacy measures, maybe? When you are forbidden to connect a user and the user's data.

Re: Mathematicians want proof OpenAI didn't use their work

#62

Post by inglor_cz »

loose-cannon wrote: post #41
kova12 wrote: post #36

Do I understand it right that people now claim an ownership of the actual mathematical methods? What next, people patenting the letters and the numbers? And then the sounds? This starts going ridiculous.

dude, proper attribution is part of scholarship and academics. Not giving credit to the people whose work led up to your solution is malpractice.

A lot depends on the concreteness/vagueness of the idea.

"Just use some polynomial" would be an idea so generic that it wouldn't merit attribution. "Just use a cyclotomic polynomial of degree 24" is a lot more concrete.

(I have no idea where the exact limit lies and I have no idea how precise or vague were the ideas in those discussions.)

Re: Mathematicians want proof OpenAI didn't use their work

#63

Post by krater23 »

kedikedi wrote: post #6
forlorn wrote: post #3

Why are people so possessive? Why wouldn't they just release their work for the profit of humanity? I'm genuinely curious.

I don’t think it is people being possessive but rather people finding their value over the work they do (sentence ended up being weird but I hope the idea is clear). So I see someone dedicating a sizeable portion of their life on a discovery and not being credited is the problem here. Otherwise it would be published in a journal anyway.

When you put a unpublished sizeable portion of your life in a ChatGPT window, then it's your own fault. I trust these AI companies as far as I can throw one of their data centers.

When your work is unimportant enough for you to not setup a local AI, just shut up.

Re: Mathematicians want proof OpenAI didn't use their work

#64

Post by krater23 »

xxs wrote: post #14
forlorn wrote: post #3

Why are people so possessive? Why wouldn't they just release their work for the profit of humanity? I'm genuinely curious.

a quote from the article: "Thom said it “would be ethically indefensible” if nonpublic research supplied by users helped to improve models that the company then used to race those very same users to publication, without consent, proper disclosure, or credit."

Would one of this users tell their opponents what he is doing? And if yes, would anyone wonder when the opponent would use this information. Be dumb, win dumb prices.

Re: Mathematicians want proof OpenAI didn't use their work

#65

Post by loose-cannon »

inglor_cz wrote: post #62
loose-cannon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dude, proper attribution is part of scholarship and academics. Not giving credit to the people whose work led up to your solution is malpractice.

A lot depends on the concreteness/vagueness of the idea. "Just use some polynomial" would be an idea so generic that it wouldn't merit attribution. "Just use a cyclotomic polynomial of degree 24" is a lot more concrete. (I have no idea where the exact limit lies and I have no idea how precise or vague were the ideas in those discussions.)

These kinds of responses aren't helpful. Your response essentially muddies the water because it sets an artificial standard that nobody can/will meet. Yes, you're correct. There likely is some grey area with how we decide to give credit. Are we talking about the same story? This isn't "a polynomial". This is a research program that has been ongoing for years or possibly decades with nontrivial contributions. If you're not sure what does or does not deserve credit, you should engage with the community instead of suggesting that the idea of giving credit is "vague".

Re: Mathematicians want proof OpenAI didn't use their work

#66

Post by impossiblefork »

aennassiri wrote: post #42

If OpenAI remained a full nonprofit looking to build an "OPEN" AI for the benefit of all humanity (not only the US or a few shareholders), I would have been happy to share my code, my work, and even label their data... This said, I don't blame them. It's a difficult mission to remain a nonprofit and, at the same time, have the required capital investment to build AGI. I'm not criticizing them, but I hope this race to…

Same way for me.

Imagine what a genuinely openness-focused organization of this sort could be. Even if we imagined a commercial half, we could imagine a foundation with mass-membership, perhaps with a membership fee equal to 1/2 the typical personal subscription and functioning to set the direction, elect the board, etc., and then a commercial half which might be rough, tricky, deceptive, making deals with anybody.

I think I'd have been fine with the commercial half being a bit of a monster, as long as I'm part of the members and we decide what sort of board it gets and there's a clear "this is basically controlled by the public" and if I were part of a club of this sort, I would, like you absolutely fill up a directory with texts and computer programs and careful annotations to aid training.

and they could have had it. It could have been easy to make an organization like this. I think you still can. An international AI club, the members vote on what sort of training material may be supplied and for what intents, create some committees to review quality, and then everyone starts making their little games and RL environments and annotated stories and programs that ordinary LLMs misunderstand, and then they get together and fine-tune something, and if that works well they then get some staff and better training infrastructure and end up with a commercial half.

Re: Mathematicians want proof OpenAI didn't use their work

#68

Post by inglor_cz »

loose-cannon wrote: post #65
inglor_cz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot depends on the concreteness/vagueness of the idea. "Just use some polynomial" would be an idea so generic that it wouldn't merit attribution. "Just use a cyclotomic polynomial of degree 24" is a lot more concrete. (I have no idea where the exact limit lies and I have no idea how precise or vague were the ideas in those discussions.)

These kinds of responses aren't helpful. Your response essentially muddies the water because it sets an artificial standard that nobody can/will meet. Yes, you're correct. There likely is some grey area with how we decide to give credit. Are we talking about the same story? This isn't "a polynomial". This is a research program that has been ongoing for years or possibly decades with nontrivial contributions. If you'r…

I used to be a young mathematician once.

Hashing out a problem is a complicated thing. From the point of the AI, or another person, even a negative suggestion ("I tried computing those Jacobians and they showed nothing of value") can be very helpful in steering you away from non-productive paths, but we rarely attribute such negative suggestions in print, we may not even remember them.

All in all I think that OpenAI should have mentioned using material from those people, but I would also like to know what material and to what extent.

Re: Mathematicians want proof OpenAI didn't use their work

#69

Post by ozgung »

arutar wrote: post #30

Here is some (adjacent, but relevant) context, which has been posted elsewhere but I think is worthwhile to mention again here: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117237320796901560 Especially in recent years the mathematics community has worked very much in good faith, and a lot of effort is spent trying to give appropriate credit for ideas. Even when ideas are discovered in parallel if it turns out that previous work cont…

This is actually bigger than that. This is an "AI is eating the world" situation.

The math community was one of the first to be affected because RLVR makes Math an easier target for AI. We witness AI eating the math community.

Software community was also affected due to similar and other reasons. All other professional communities will face a similar challenge in the near future.

Re: Mathematicians want proof OpenAI didn't use their work

#70

Post by seanhunter »

monster_truck wrote: post #55
throwaway713 wrote: post #19

Am I missing something obvious? Isn’t this just a simple DB query to see the state history of the “Data Controls” → “Improve model for everyone” toggle in the settings? Just report whether that was ever on and over what time period.

Yes you're missing several obvious things. Even saving the last changed date (nevermind every change date or what the change was) for every setting for every user would be earth crushingly wasteful. The value by itself isn't even worth including in backups.

Storing the last changed date for every single person on earth (even though not every person is an OpenAI customer) is something you could easily do on a laptop. It would be a rounding error for OpenAI.

I don't know what format they use for storage, but Iceberg would be a reasonable choice. A date in iceberg format is 4 bytes[1]. I checked postgres as well as a reference point. It also uses 4 bytes for a date, so whatever they use it's going to be about that.

Current world population is just shy of 8.3 Billion people [2].

4 bytes times 8.3 billion people gives 30.92 GiB. [3] OpenAI's training data will be in the petabyte range at least.

[1] https://iceberg.apache.org/spec/#schema-evolution

[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/ and elsewhere, say census.gov if you want a US source https://www.census.gov/popclock/world

[3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=4+bytes+*+8.3+billion+i...

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