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More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math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Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#701

Post by SecretDreams »

luma wrote: post #567
dwaltrip wrote: post #513

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.

What's that saying about wrestling with pigs?

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#702

Post by selestify »

underlipton wrote: post #663
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 smal…

What a great analogy, can't believe I haven't heard it before

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#704

Post by gw32 »

wiei wrote: post #649
michael0church wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

Was it? They've been dishing out cheap access specifically to researchers give over lmao. The researcher's got lured in - they need to accept they got played TBH. Altman is certainly more devious than Amodei - he's shown that time and time again. PG was right about he said about him. Every entity on earth should see it as a kill shot: be careful what you put in the models. None of your information is safe.

Altman miscalculated badly. OpenAI took what could have been amazing publicity, and in a rush to publish, gave reason for users to distrust their core product.

It's like they're allergic to slowing down.

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#705

Post by eru »

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #645
keeda wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But by OpenAI's telling they heard a rumor that the problem had already been solved. So they reached out to the other researchers as an attempt to share the credit, and in fact have at least one of them be the lead author (which is when they found out the AI had solved a broader problem than the researchers.) Seems pretty ethically palatable. I suspect the main reason the community is not receiving it well is largely…

> I suspect the main reason the community is not receiving it well is largely the same reason many developers are not receiving coding agents well. Because the training data is millions of hours human efforts being distilled into a cascading hierarchy of enrichment by interested parties without providing attribution or compensation?

I don't see the cascading hierarchy of enrichment.

I mean, they are certainly trying, but so far there's too much competition so the surplus mostly goes to customers.

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

#706

Post by jeswin »

All of these accusations could be true. But there's also no way for a company to casually claim "No, we did not train on your data", without verifying all the knobs the user might have turned to enable or disable data sharing.

I just don't understand getting the pitchforks out because a company did not give an answer immediately. And the effect such data entering training would have affected the output is even less clear.

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

#707

Post by eru »

raincole wrote: post #504
ozgung wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. 1. Buckmaster contacted OpenAI first. Not the other way. 2. Giving the $1M bounty to a human mathematician for the effort and giving him credit would be excellent PR. They had already burned much more than $1M for the generation. Adding him as author also costs nothing. Purely pragmatical. 3. “As long as he removed Alpöge” part itself is against academic honesty by all means. 4. Buckmaster rejected fame and $1M o…

First of all I put "generosity" in quotes because I don't believe a corporation as big as OpenAI is even capable of acting out of generosity. It's always one of the three: A) PR B) commoditizing complements C) stupidity. In this case it's more like C) though, as in hindsight the best move OpenAI could do is insisting that they just used an insurmountable number of tokens to exhaust all the published directions. They…

Your theory of how companies work is certainly interesting.

It sounds like you think they have solved the principal–agent problem?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

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

#708

Post by nvdc »

keeda wrote: post #632
magicalist wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not obvious to me that's an unethical thing to do In terms of work in mathematics, something I personally would not do based on ethical grounds would be to hear a rumor that some researchers are taking a certain approach and may be nearing a solution, use a model that was possibly contaminated with intimate knowledge about that approach (though later they investigated and think it wasn't), and then commit mill…

But by OpenAI's telling they heard a rumor that the problem had already been solved. So they reached out to the other researchers as an attempt to share the credit, and in fact have at least one of them be the lead author (which is when they found out the AI had solved a broader problem than the researchers.) Seems pretty ethically palatable. I suspect the main reason the community is not receiving it well is largely…

as a developer that had a brief career in academia, i don't think your last comment is right at all. 99.9% of what i work on as a webdev, even if it's challenging and unique at the margins, is not really novel. concerns about job security aside, i don't really think of an agent as stealing my ideas because it's good at writing CRUD APIs.

collaborating with ChatGPT on a novel solution to an unsolved problem, getting 90% of the way there, and then being "scooped" by your AI collaborator (or rather by the company behind it) is a totally different situation. were i in the same situation as these researchers, it would be extremely hard to take OpenAPI's explanation + denial of plagiarism seriously

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

#709

Post by bwfan123 »

pera wrote: post #16

Everything you say can and will be trained against you

> Everything you say can and will be trained against you

So, experts are incentivized to seed LLM data with false-leads to confound it. Already, garbage is being published on arxiv and elsewhere, and many sloppy code-repos too hastening the process. Expert inputs will be in more demand to un-shittify.

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

#710

Post by Madmallard »

Let's see:

1.) The tool they made is only possible by stealing the assets of everyone on the planet that published them in a consumable fashion online or even in written form

2.) They are destroying books they use to train with

3.) They are totally careless about the potential negative impact of the tool on everything

Just with that already, I don't see why they ever merited any of your trust.

I bet they are willing to take everything given to them and assess it for marketable merit and in the future take action on those items they deem viable.

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