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More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math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Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#811

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #783
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are simply incorrect. It is not a fallacy of that type, or any other type, because the words do, in fact, mean the same thing, as multiple people have pointed out here. Whether referring to chatbots or people, "prompt" means "to move to action". If you have some reliable source supporting your unilateral claims that "prompt" does not mean this, please share. Otherwise, the consensus seems to be contrary to your c…

Why do I need a source? An LLM prompt does not "move to action", because an LLM does not act. People act, animals act, software doesn't act. Acting implies volition and volition implies cognition and if you think that LLMs have those things then you're the one who should provide a source for your claim.

> Why do I need a source?

Because your entire post is a personal, philosophic opinion on what words should mean, and how if someone disagrees with this personal opinion of 1/7,000,000,000 of people, then they are wrong. Every single one of these claims is unsupported and contradicted by reliable sources like a dictionary:

> An LLM prompt does not "move to action"

> an LLM does not act

> software doesn't act

> Acting implies volition

The only way such opinions could viably be considered "true" is if you convinced a majority of people to agree with you on the changes, which you decidedly have not.

Until you do, we can go by the existing definitions: "prompt" means "to move to action", "act" means "the doing of a thing" (note the absence of "volition" or "cognition" in the actual definition), and by all reasonable accounts, LLMs "do things".

I mean, just take a step back and dispassionately look at your ridiculous claim that nobody prompts LLMs (because you now claim only a human can be prompted, because only living creatures can do a thing). Do you really think you can gain consensus from folks on that claim?

There are many differences between LLMs and people, but this is not one of them, according to all reliable sources I've found so far. Feel free to share the reliable sources which led you to your personal conclusion here.

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

#812

Post by derangedHorse »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #784
boothby wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was pretty depressed when I read about what happened with Navier Stokes this morning. The Clay Math prizes were a significant motivation through my math career, and I know a lot of computer scientists and physicists that feel similarly. I didn't think I was gonna resolve P vs NP or the BSD conjecture, but I did really research that felt like I was working towards something incredible. What is the younger generation…

This is no time to despair. It's the time to take a stand. If you don't want to see your discipline go the way of the dodo, then do something about it. I don't know what you should do because I'm not a mathematician. But superintelligence schmuperintelligence. We didn't stop running because we have cars or playing chess or Go because there's chess and Go engines. Even more so than chess there's no point in maths unle…

> AI maths makes no sense, like AI art makes no sense, because those are things that people enjoy and can do pretty damn well ourselves so there's no point to automate them away.

There are people who appreciate and have use for math and art, but don't or can't produce. Those same people are now given tools to produce works that they enjoy and can do pretty damn well at.

> Those are brave men. Let's go kill them!

This is a horrible perversion of the quote. Aside from it's questionable use in this context (as it can be construed as a violent call to action), Tyrion made the battle cry for self-defense against a threat to their lives. Generally, AI reducing the dependence of one human on another's work is incomparable to this.

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

#813

Post by user43928 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #808
user43928 wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you specify what leverage you think Brubeck has over an independent professor's career in order to make threats? I see none, and consequently Brubeck's explanation makes more sense to me. I understand he meant these words, which he supposedly retracted on the spot, in a "why would you ruin your career with this behavior / turning down the opportunity I am offering" way. You don't think that is the likely explanat…

I'm not sure the value of speculating, but since you insist... If someone said to you "you're going to regret this, mo-fo!", do you really need to suppose they had a specific plan in mind, rather than just intent to intimidate? If you want to suppose that Brubeck had a concrete plan for how he would ruin Buskmaster's career, then my best guess would be that he was threatening for OpenAI to publish without giving any…

Bubeck made no such demands, particularly not for removing Levent from authorship of his own work.

What they discussed was that Bubeck felt it would be inappropriate for an Anthropic employee to author the proposed rewrite of OpenAI's proof.

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

#814

Post by pred_ »

nezi wrote: 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…

Another scenario also just surfaced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49657499 – the construction used by Anthropic for the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample appears to have existed in an unpublished but publically available document. This document of course wasn't referenced in the announcement (nor did we ever get to see the prompt or reasoning traces).

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

#815

Post by riedel »

5555watch wrote: post #564
riedel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what arxiv is about. We have been facing the same problem with review processes by before. Nothing all too specific here.

At least in my experience, the issue with ArXiv is that the expectation is that the draft should be already in a good enough state. And polishing plus writing the meat around the main result can take a lot of time

This is true, as preprints are addressing the 'problem' at a later point in time. I guess git is better if you do not want to assign an identifier to an immutable version yet.

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

#816

Post by lirolero »

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…

> I suspect

That's worthless.

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

#817

Post by lirolero »

chii wrote: post #739
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> without providing attribution or compensation? many teachers also taught many students over the course of history, and very few would eventually pay any compensation or even attribute their financial (or career) outcomes to the teachers. What made model training different?

> What made model training different?

nuances

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

#818

Post by derangedHorse »

oefrha wrote: post #699
nomel wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They intentionally left Buckmaster and Alpöge out of the citations. No, they asked if they could do a joint publish.

No, they asked one guy to do a joint publish conditioned on leaving the other collaborator out, with veiled threats. The joint publish part smells awfully like admission of guilt given there’s absolutely no reason to do it if you believe you independently arrived at the result using only public prior work. The leaving out collaborator part is outright academic malpractice. Disclosure: I was an academic once.

This would be a new publication with OpenAI's novel solution. Buckmaster and Alpöge did not arrive at the NS solution, they used an approach that also happened to be used in OpenAI's proof.

> there’s absolutely no reason to do it if you believe you independently arrived at the result using only public prior work

Unless the goal is to assuage the existential pain felt by many mathematicians with respect to what may feel like increasingly inconsequential efforts. It also seemed like a way to build good will amongst knowledge workers dealing with similar issues, with the goal of showing they are dedicated to easing the transition for them as society parades into the future. This has clearly backfired.

> The leaving out collaborator part is outright academic malpractice.

They would not be leaving a collaborator out. Again, this would be a new publication. Here's the quote from Buckmaster's post [1]:

"Two proposals were offered to me. The first was that we post our Euler result, and that OpenAI post its Navier-Stokes result the next day. The second was that, after posting Euler, I alone write a paper presenting the Navier-Stokes result, acknowledging that an internal OpenAI model had resolved it."

[1] https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf

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

#819

Post by anfogoat »

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.

I haven't seen that. Where is that from?

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

#820

Post by oefrha »

derangedHorse wrote: post #818
oefrha wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they asked one guy to do a joint publish conditioned on leaving the other collaborator out, with veiled threats. The joint publish part smells awfully like admission of guilt given there’s absolutely no reason to do it if you believe you independently arrived at the result using only public prior work. The leaving out collaborator part is outright academic malpractice. Disclosure: I was an academic once.

This would be a new publication with OpenAI's novel solution. Buckmaster and Alpöge did not arrive at the NS solution, they used an approach that also happened to be used in OpenAI's proof. > there’s absolutely no reason to do it if you believe you independently arrived at the result using only public prior work Unless the goal is to assuage the existential pain felt by many mathematicians with respect to what may fe…

These are utter bullshit that breaks every norm, but may be convincing enough for some non-academic OpenAI cheerleaders who post dozens of comments on these topics.
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