More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

We checked and determined it was impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training.

If prompts were submitted earlier than that and training was not opted out, there's a chance they made their way into our training pipeline in some form. But this would be a droplet in an ocean and unlikely to have made any difference, imo.

See: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/science/tristan-buckmaste...

It's not at all scary. I know some of my ideas are poorly remembered copies of other people's work. Whenever I'm trying to build something, I spend time going through technical journals on the topic to see who invented it first and what they discovered that I haven't figured out yet. It's amazing how hours in the library save you days of beating your head against the wall.

I suggest looking at the past history of IP disputes. Humans have been "slurping up and regurgitating ideas" for a very long time. There are lots of examples of parallel creation, rediscovering old ideas independently, telling an idea to the wrong person, and having them claim credit for it.

- Newton/Leibniz clash over who invented calculus. - Niccolò Tartaglia vs. Gerolamo Cardano clash over the formula used to solve cubic equations. This was also an independent rediscovery, as Scipione del Ferro discovered and published the formula earlier. - There are multiple literary works in print, music, and film that have competing claims. - Meccano versus Erector Set: developed about 20 years apart in England and the United States. Unclear if it's independent invention or copied. US developer Alfred Carlton Gilbert claims he was inspired by steel girder construction of infrastructure.

also https://community.thriveglobal.com/10-famous-inventions-that...

The brute-forcing is a good, old-fashioned generate-and-test approach like in Simon and Newell's Logic Theorist, which was presented in the Dartmouth convention in 1956, where AI was named by John McCarthy. Logic Theorist caused a big stir by (re) proving several of the theorems in Principia Mathematica by Russel and Whitehead.

There was much excitement, then, as now, for this kind of approach and there were several systems that followed along the same lines, e.g. Automated Mathematician by Doug Lenat.

Eventually it became clear that this approach is limited by what it can generate: you may have a sound and complete verifier, but if the generator, i.e. the first step in the generate-and-test pipeline, is incomplete, then the entire thing will run out of steam sooner or later.

The difference with LLMs is that they are... well, large. They are the most powerful generators ever created. That means their limits are not in sight and it will probably take us a very long time to find them.

Which is all to say that, yes of course, automatic verification is indispensable. But without an LLM generating an unprecedentedly large number of plausible theorems, there would be no AI mathematics, or in any case AI mathematics wouldn't have gone as far as it has.

I hate to be that dinosaur, but this is exactly what I’ve been warning about since XaaS began taking off in the mid-oughts: any provider you use can and will use your data for their own benefit regardless of any contracts or safeguards in place, especially if the benefits outweigh the consequences.

Honestly, I’m surprised it took this long for some company to really go all the way, though. OpenAI really making it transparently clear that they can and will do whatever they want with the data you provide them, contracts or settings be damned. Completely untrustworthy as an entity, full stop.

Of course, I’m also too jaded to think this will change anything. Folks will move to Anthropic, or Gemini, or Grok, or some other hosted model on a pubCSP managing the harness and logs for them, and then do another shocked-Pikachu face when it happens again.

If you aren’t running workloads on infrastructure you own, then your privacy, security, and general outcomes are at the sole whims of the hosting provider - who can and will fuck you over the exact second it’s more beneficial for them to do so than the loss of trust incurred.

You are both using a different definition of sharing I believe. When people have an expectation of privacy, use by others should be forbidden. Tech has gone completely off the rails with the use of private data.