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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

#81

It's a little like we've gone back to the problem of the customer becoming the product. If I were a mathematician I would not my unpublished work to go into the hands of a competitor. If I were a lawyer I wouldn't want private details of my defense to be made available to the prosecution. Anonymous or otherwise. I wouldn't want the plot to an unreleased book to be suggested to another author.

If I were a business, I wouldn't want my proprietary business information into a hands of a competitor. But CEOs are racing to do it, and (at best) relying in flimsy contractual guarantees they have no means to verify.

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

#82

It's a little like we've gone back to the problem of the customer becoming the product. If I were a mathematician I would not my unpublished work to go into the hands of a competitor. If I were a lawyer I wouldn't want private details of my defense to be made available to the prosecution. Anonymous or otherwise. I wouldn't want the plot to an unreleased book to be suggested to another author.

If I were a business, I wouldn't want my proprietary business information into a hands of a competitor. But CEOs are racing to do it, and (at best) relying in flimsy contractual guarantees they have no means to verify.

[dead]

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

#83

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.)

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

#84
post #72

Andrew Wiles gave 3 lectures, and only at the end of the last one he announced that he solved FLT. Imagine someone from the audience announced in between the second and the third lecture that they proved FLT (using his ideas, obviously). Why is it OK if openAI does it?

This is a great analogy, and one I'm surprised more people haven't raised. Instead all your hear are comments about mathematicians being sour losers, they should have know the model terms of service etc...

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

#85

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.

Multiple OpenAI staff have publicly said they cannot do that as accessing specific user settings without their consent (or legal requirement) violates their internal privacy policy. However, the mathematicians could easily declare whether they had the toggle on or off. Yet curiously, they will not say!

So if the scientist(s) will reports that they had it enabled, it would mean that OpenAI lied, when they made a statement about not using their chats for training, right?:)

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

#86
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple OpenAI staff have publicly said they cannot do that as accessing specific user settings without their consent (or legal requirement) violates their internal privacy policy. However, the mathematicians could easily declare whether they had the toggle on or off. Yet curiously, they will not say!

So if the scientist(s) will reports that they had it enabled, it would mean that OpenAI lied, when they made a statement about not using their chats for training, right?:)

OpenAI didn't say they didn't use their chats for training. You should go read the actual statement!

https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

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

#87
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They didn't know that the product they were using was one of their opponents. That's the entire complaint, that it represents a conflict of interest to engage in direct competition with your customers, who aren't competing with your main business model.

If Google or Microsoft suddenly got in the business of publishing books, and mined established authors' works in progress for material to publish, that would also be a bad look, even though we know that they likely have access to our files.

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

#88

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…

Both you and the parent comment give Sam Altman a lot of undue credit. He was given funding specifically because his sociopathic tendencies were considered useful for the job. It was only after he had connections through YC that he started fearmongering around AI. The "AGI" concept as he describes it is part and parcel with this deceptive marketing that he does.

How can any of us act surprised, now that OpenAI has gone mask-off? Sam made those Worldcoin orbs. He's Paul Graham's cannibal king. You have been warned at every stop along this road, and yet we still take him seriously when he says empty platitudes to placate investors. AGI is like "China's Final Warning", a plain lie that only teases a potential innovation but never precedes it.

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

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Both you and the parent comment give Sam Altman a lot of undue credit. He was given funding specifically because his sociopathic tendencies were considered useful for the job. It was only after he had connections through YC that he started fearmongering around AI. The "AGI" concept as he describes it is part and parcel with this deceptive marketing that he does. How can any of us act surprised, now that OpenAI has go…

Ah, I didn't intend to imply anything of that sort.

It's just that I, having never seen what that would actually be like, imagine that I'd be fine with a genuinely democratic mass-organization for LLM development which has a cutthroat, even OpenAI-level cutthroat commercial arm.

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

#90

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.

Multiple OpenAI staff have publicly said they cannot do that as accessing specific user settings without their consent (or legal requirement) violates their internal privacy policy. However, the mathematicians could easily declare whether they had the toggle on or off. Yet curiously, they will not say!

Zero reason to believe open AI employees, big tech has history of employees/subcontractors creeping on exes and minors, someone with keys to creep on customer for valuations is more parsimonious.
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