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More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

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581–590 of 850 posts

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#581

[dead]

It already has. Inside just about every company on the planet are conversations this week revisiting the idea of giving these labs access to ANY data, further ramping up commentary on why don’t we just use open models on our own infra where we don’t have to “trust” anyone.

This PR stunt by OpenAI may go down in history as the thing that finally broke them for good.

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#583
post #412

I think it's a useful analogy to compare OpenAI to a human collaborator. These researchers willingly collaborated with an OpenAI model, giving it ideas, and OpenAI provided useful replies. Then, OpenAI goes ahead and publishes work along the lines of this collaboration, without attributing the researchers. If OpenAI was in fact a human researcher, this would be highly unethical. Now, OpenAI is claiming that the model…

I think it's better to ignore OpenAI here, because OpenAI didn't do anything. Academic research is a professional field in the traditional sense. Individual researchers are ultimately responsible for their actions. If some OpenAI employees violated academic norms while doing academic research, they should be judged by academic standards. Scooping someone else's result is immoral but not an outright violation of acade…

[deleted - misunderstood!]

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#584
I would like an unambiguously clear statement from OpenAI as to what they do with data collected from non-business accounts when:

(a) The data controls setting to train on the data is unchecked.

(b) The privacy controls opt-out has been submitted.

(c) Both.

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#585

[dead]

It already has. Inside just about every company on the planet are conversations this week revisiting the idea of giving these labs access to ANY data, further ramping up commentary on why don’t we just use open models on our own infra where we don’t have to “trust” anyone. This PR stunt by OpenAI may go down in history as the thing that finally broke them for good.

> This PR stunt by OpenAI may go down in history as the thing that finally broke them for good.

~0% chance of this happening

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#586

Tangential to the subject, but this is a bluesky post, containing a screenshot of an X post, which itself starts with "in a detailed Mastodon post"...

The digital version of "my friend's cousin's neighbor heard that ..."

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#587
post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enterprise Agreements can have binding terms for this. When I launch the ChatGPT desktop app, and open the options pane it says "Corpname data is not used for OpenAI training". I would expect academic institutions to require equivalent contractual terms.

Some of the recent statements have caused at least me to look those claims in a bit more nuanced light. In particular what does OpenAI consider to be "your data"? I would assume input (prompt) to be it at least. However it becomes more murky when you consider other aspects. Is output "your data"? Is the chain of thought that you are not even allowed to see? Can they use these and possibly even inputs to generate synt…

Exactly. We as users have zero way to confirm they are honoring even the letter of these agreements, much less the intent. And it's super easy for them to weasel around and find a way to cheat while still having a legal claim to honoring the contract. And if you've forgotten, all of these companies are built on a foundation of ignoring copyright law.

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#588
post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard they also tried to strong-arm them into removing the name of their collaborator who happened to work at a different company (Anthropic)... I haven't looked into it myself, but if true, that seems incredibly scummy.

The flip side is that the Anthropic researcher is clearly pushing the case against Open AI and one might have reason to suspect their motivation and version of events for the same reasons. What a mess.

> The flip side is that the Anthropic researcher is clearly pushing the case against Open AI and one might have reason to suspect their motivation and version of events for the same reasons.

I haven't seen any evidence of this. Much of the anger is coming from the unaffiliated researcher. levent (the anthropic employee) has mostly constrained his comments to basically "I would have been happy to collaborate w/ folks from OAI"

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#589
post #412

I think it's a useful analogy to compare OpenAI to a human collaborator. These researchers willingly collaborated with an OpenAI model, giving it ideas, and OpenAI provided useful replies. Then, OpenAI goes ahead and publishes work along the lines of this collaboration, without attributing the researchers. If OpenAI was in fact a human researcher, this would be highly unethical. Now, OpenAI is claiming that the model…

The problem here is that OAI (and others) pretend or claim that this is uncharted legal territory, where in fact it is very simple. We have a machine that is fed data, and produces new data as a result. If that new data depends (in any way) on the fed data, then from a legal viewpoint it is derived from that data.

Whether they anthropomorphize the operation performed by the machine does not matter. They can anthropomorphize when/if the law is updated to include such terms, but right now they certainly cannot.

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#590
post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's better to ignore OpenAI here, because OpenAI didn't do anything. Academic research is a professional field in the traditional sense. Individual researchers are ultimately responsible for their actions. If some OpenAI employees violated academic norms while doing academic research, they should be judged by academic standards. Scooping someone else's result is immoral but not an outright violation of acade…

[deleted - misunderstood!]

My point was that if someone is at fault, it's the individual OpenAI employees. Because they chose to engage in a professional field, they can't use "boss told me to do so" as a defense.
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