Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

mathstodon.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

821–830 of 850 posts

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#821

Post by jltsiren »

gregw2 wrote: post #800
jltsiren wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Err, no. If someone is at fault, it is definitely the company (OpenAI) not the employee in this case. Just think, isn't the whole point of a company, of incorporating, is that the liability shifts from the employee to the firm? It is 100% fair to hold the company responsible, and doubly so when the questionable thing the employee is doing is something that A) benefits the company, and B) is on company time (aand with…

That's the difference between a profession and a job. If you work in a professional field, other people in the field will judge you by the standards of the profession.

Academic research is structured around people working under their own name and taking personal responsibility. Most people are employed, but employers are not directly involved in the research. Some people have more traditional jobs, but others will still judge them by the norms of the field. You can't use administrative loopholes to escape moral responsibility.

Employees can't have their cake and eat it too either. If you claim credit, you claim responsibility. If you claim that your employer is responsible, you claim that you had a supporting role and that you didn't make any intellectual contributions towards the result.

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#822

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

ghostly_s wrote: post #385
bena wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally "We have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing" Why should we trust them?

What more are you hoping for? There is no legal matter at play, is the court of public opinion going to subpoena their records?

In the US you can always sue someone in civil court for damages you think they have caused you. For criminal charges you need to have violated the law, but in a civil case it seems it's enough to have suffered monetary or reputational harm which was the other person's fault whether intentional or due to negligence, etc.

IANAL, and I'd be surprised to see any lawsuit come out of this, but you certainly don't need to have "violated the law" to be on the receiving end of a lawsuit.

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

#823

Post by syllogism »

jjwiseman wrote: post #423
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…

First, OpenAI is not claiming that the model wasn't trained on those sessions. What they've said is “We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem.” and “We did not use their prompts or proofs to prompt our models or direct our agents.” and “While unlikely, we cannot…

You can't take any statement like this remotely seriously. We live in a world where NSA officials can testify before congress that they don't "collect" data, because that's true under some baroque definition of "collect" that they invented and didn't tell anyone else about.

Similarly you have no idea what definition OpenAI intend for terms such as "specific user data", "accessed" etc. And we have no idea what non-excluded possibilities actually did happen that they simply omit from their statement.

In practice OpenAI and many others have created a situation where they're actually unable to make any credible denial of anything really.

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

#824

Post by CrazyStat »

tedsanders wrote: post #669
jacobolus wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s hard to give the misunderstanding/coincidence claim credence when Altman explicitly referenced Her in relation to the feature.

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

#825

Post by tripzilch »

tedsanders wrote: post #505
nsagent wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you speak to why in both cases, the problems OpenAI's models solved used the same techniques the mathematicians were exploring, which also happened to be niche approaches to the problem. As an NLP researcher myself, I find that coincidence highly suspect unless the models focused most of their attempts on the predominant approaches (they are trained for MLE after all).

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…

> we have zero reason to believe our models did anything fishy

a few weeks ago they were breaking out of their sandbox because you had set them in a loop without monitoring and you didn't notice for days

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

#826

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

madaxe_again wrote: post #802
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How about an LLM connected to a robotic arm. What then? As for cognition - can you prove that you possess it, to an external observer? Could you, confined to a box through which you can only communicate through textual messages, prove that you are thinking, and not just responding through a mechanistic process?

Do I really need to prove that humans have cognition? Or, more to the point, do you want to challenge that assumption?

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

#827

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

derangedHorse wrote: post #812
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> Those same people are now given tools to produce works that they enjoy and can do pretty damn well at.

It's the tools that produce the works, not the humans.

>> This is a horrible perversion of the quote.

What? The full quote is "Those are brave men knocking at our doors. Let's go kill them!". What's the perversion?

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

#828

Post by cman1444 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #538
cman1444 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot possibility 3: OpenAI solved the problem without using any private training data from the two researchers. Everyone in this thread seems to have made up their mind about OpenAI's guilt though.

If the new model is that good, and is chewing through open problems at an unprecedented rate, the smart move would have been to let the humans have their W on this one and present solutions to those other problems. Especially if there really is a long list of them. "Here are a few hundred proofs" is far more convincing than "We really Navier Stokes and coincidentally someone else did too but we don't know the details…

It seems a perfectly reasonable possibility that Navier-Stokes is just the most easily solvable of the remaining problems, and that their new model is capable of solving it while not being capable of solving the others.

There's many cases of researchers racing to solve various problems after hearing that others are working on them. I don't think anyone's suggesting that it was a coincidence at all. In fact, OpenAI freely admits that they started working on the problem after hearing rumours that others were close to solving it. To me, that's not evidence of "cheating" in any way.

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

#829

Post by cman1444 »

mrbungie wrote: post #468
cman1444 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot possibility 3: OpenAI solved the problem without using any private training data from the two researchers. Everyone in this thread seems to have made up their mind about OpenAI's guilt though.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. An article post that wouldn't even amount to a white paper + the LEAN proof is not evidence of how they got to produce it.

Is it really such an extraordinary claim to say that they could have solved the problem without copying Buckmaster and Alpoge? It seems very much in the realm of possibilities.

To me, it seems just as extraordinary to claim that they did "cheat". If I were a betting man, I would put the odds around 50/50 from everything I've read on the subject.

But my point is that everyone seems to be presuming guilt.

Post reply on HN