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More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

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Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#661

Post by fn-mote »

famouswaffles wrote: post #539
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, good to know (if they can be trusted - Altman clearly is a liar), but it doesn't really change the big picture much. 1) OpenAI by their own admission, only re-tackled Navier-Stokes because they heard it had already been solved (but not yet published). This isn't advancing science or helping the mathematical community, this is just being a dick. 2) OpenAI, specifically Sebastien Brubeck, then threaten to "not be n…

1. I would agree if the rumours were that some mathematician(s) had solved them, but the rumors alleged it was Anthropic. I don't really see what the big deal was. They had a new model that was going along great and wanted to test its mettle. 2. Yes Brubeck's comments were weird at face value. That said, Open AI's proof isn't a duplication of anything. Not only is Tristan's work a sub problem but the methods are diff…

> Interesting way to frame progress that didn't move along till an LLM generated proof.

This part of your argument is totally wrong. The OpenAI approach begins with the B/L work. The belief / knowledge that their approach would pan out is worth a lot - it means essentially “depth-first” search in this direction will be more fruitful than a general search.

Unless you are counting the B/L work as LLM generated. Is that your argument? Even if you do consider it that way, to me racing in for a scoop isn’t a good look.

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#662

Post by sk4rekr0w »

phyzome wrote: post #601
sk4rekr0w wrote: post #554

"We can say categorically that it is impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training." This is the third day of total hysteria that is based on nothing of substance. Move on folks.

Even if that were true, they've already admitting to throwing vast quantities of resources to scoop a researcher who was about to publish (because they'd learned, somehow, of his breakthrough). If that doesn't bother you I think you need to take a step back and have a good think about this.

[flagged]

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

#663

Post by underlipton »

michael0church wrote: post #532

[dead]

This. These platforms are asking to be trusted with unprecedented amounts of the public's data and, unprecedentedly itself, the public's reasoning and decision-making. It's an awesome responsibility that requires a singular approach that smaller platforms with less responsibility don't necessarily have to devote resources to. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Facebook, they're the big dogs. They can't do the things the small guys can get away with. They're the 18-wheelers, and when you're an 18-wheeler, you HAVE to act differently. You stay in the middle lane, you do not speed, you always yield, because when you make a mistake, when you drive aggressively, you can kill dozens and blow up and interstate and stop traffic for hours, if not days. You don't get to do shit like this; the cost of everyone giving you their data is that you give up every opportunity to use it for your own interests, even though you technically have the capability to exploit it.

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

#664

Post by underlipton »

TheGamerUncle wrote: post #628
user43928 wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the fact that it almost certainly did not happen? I read today that OpenAI after investigation was able to categorically rule out that usage data from before beginning of July could have affected the system that was used.

Answering here because it does not let me reply to your second comment. but you said and I quote here verbatim: >"When you leave the relevant 'Help improve the model' toggle on, everyone working at the labs says it isn't used in the way you imagine" I have personally deactivated that toggle on multiple occasions and for some reason it keeps getting toggled on, as a matter of fact you can find multiple posts by people…

>I have personally deactivated that toggle on multiple occasions and for some reason it keeps getting toggled on

Thank you for pointing that out. I just checked, and mine was on, too. Annoyingly, the toggle even stalls a bit, so I hit it twice when the first time didn't seem to work, and it quickly toggled off and then on again.

I hate it here.

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

#667

Post by nl »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #498
famouswaffles wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI have come out and said: >The Wednesday evening statement from OpenAI was more emphatic: “We can say categorically that it is impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training.” >The statement added, “After investigating, we can say with full confidence that no user inputs past July 3rd could have influenced this system in any way…

OK, good to know (if they can be trusted - Altman clearly is a liar), but it doesn't really change the big picture much. 1) OpenAI by their own admission, only re-tackled Navier-Stokes because they heard it had already been solved (but not yet published). This isn't advancing science or helping the mathematical community, this is just being a dick. 2) OpenAI, specifically Sebastien Brubeck, then threaten to "not be n…

> OpenAI would have you believe this result shows how powerful their mystery better-than-Astra model is, but the reality here is that this model needed 10,000 agents, $20M of compute, and the assistance of a whole team of people at OpenAI, to replicate (then exceed) the work that just took two people, with some academic grants as an AI spending budget to achieve (a few $100K - listed below).

I think you have to work pretty hard to minimize what OpenAI achieved here like this.

The Navier-Stokes equations have been around since 1850. The smoothness problem has been well known for over a hundred years and has only gained importance. It's been a Millennium Problem since 2000.

Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster did great work to solve the related Euler problem, but didn't solve the Navier-Stokes smoothness problem.

The Navier-Stokes smoothness problem has previously had significant resources working on it. Computational fluid dynamics is one of the most important tools in modern engineering and is closely related.

You speak of 10,000 agents as though it is somehow extreme, and yet within the past month I've had a single task that used over 100 agents on a mere Anthropic team plan. I think two orders of magnitude more compute to solve one of the greatest unsolved physics problems[1] is nothing.

I don't excuse Brubeck behavior because of this, but that doesn't minimize the achievement here.

[1] Wikipedia quote: In particular, solutions of the Navier–Stokes equations often include turbulence, which remains one of the greatest unsolved problems in physics, despite its immense importance in science and engineering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_existenc...

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

#668

Post by warkdarrior »

fg137 wrote: post #546
glitchc wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be unfamiliar about how research works. It's common to make an incremental advancement while citing prior work. The vast majority of papers out there fall into this bucket. Did the AI make incremental progress? Yes. Did it cite prior art? After some nudging, yes. It seems to me the academics are upset that AI scooped them. But scooping is a time-honored tradition between researchers. First to print and al…

> But scooping is a time-honored tradition between researchers. Provided that it's properly accredited. And definitely not for others' unpublished work -- that's despised upon if not an academic integrity issue. People even point out that you should add a reference to certain papers during the peer review process.

Scientific papers many times have citations of the kind "private communication." APA has a style guideline so certainly not looked down on: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/...

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

#669

Post by tedsanders »

jacobolus wrote: post #644
tedsanders wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a mathematician and I don't want to speculate about anything I can't back up. All I know about Navier-Stokes is from my graduate fluid dynamics class at Stanford a decade ago (where I received a poor grade). However, I don't want to leave you hanging, so what I will say is: - I've heard some people say the model's solution is quite different from theirs (but I have no clue how to personally assess the spiritu…

What was the "truth" in the Johansson case? Many, many people who heard the voice immediately thought it was Johansson's voice, or some kind of sound-alike, presumably picked because she voiced the computer in a popular film. From NPR: > Johansson said that nine months ago [i.e. mid 2023] Altman approached her proposing that she allow her voice to be licensed for the new ChatGPT voice assistant. He thought it would b…

It was an unfortunate misunderstanding / coincidence, as I understand it. The Sky voice actor was a real person using her own voice (not doing an impression), and she was selected via a normal process with a number of other voice actors. This happened before Sam reached out to Johansson. I totally get how Johansson would be weirded out to hear a voice similar to hers after Sam reached out and she said no, but it was purely a coincidence.

We published more details here: https://openai.com/index/how-the-voices-for-chatgpt-were-cho...

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

#670

Post by warkdarrior »

phyzome wrote: post #601
sk4rekr0w wrote: post #554

"We can say categorically that it is impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training." This is the third day of total hysteria that is based on nothing of substance. Move on folks.

Even if that were true, they've already admitting to throwing vast quantities of resources to scoop a researcher who was about to publish (because they'd learned, somehow, of his breakthrough). If that doesn't bother you I think you need to take a step back and have a good think about this.

First to publish -- it's always been this way.
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