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More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math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Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#841

Post by keeda »

Gud wrote: post #761
keeda wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not money directly, but pretty sure it's about economic disruption. These models directly undercut the value of one's skills and labor, regardless of whether this value is measured in hard cash or abstract self-worth.

They can also greatly assist you. I am working on two applications using ChatGPT and Claude. I have no illusions these people won't steal/copy whatever you want to call it, "train their models". Yes, I keep unticking the boxes that allow it, that they so kindly tick for me. But what happened to these math researchers is something else and I am not sure it's about the money for them. You don't do math research to get…

Definitely, they can also greatly assist you and that is the silver lining that I choose to focus on to prepare for the future. But most other people are focusing on the negatives because, understandably, they are immense.

As to OpenAI stealing their thunder, from all I can tell that is not what they intended. If we step away from the drama, it's low-key hilarious what happened: OpenAI heard somebody had already solved a much bigger problem -- which in fact they had not -- so they set their latest model to work on it... and it actually solved it!

Now if they had stolen the researchers work this would be a very different matter. This is something I myself have called out as a risk in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48839896 -- so I'm particularly sensitive to this aspect, but as far as I can tell this is not the case here.

Re: More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

#842

Post by tedsanders »

Eufrat wrote: post #840
tedsanders wrote: post #835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sam is not OpenAI. He's not the one who worked on voice mode, and he's not the one who worked on FrontierMath (I know both groups of people). If you believe Sam has caused OpenAI to lie about these for years, you either have to believe (a) Sam does all the work and keeps the incriminating details hidden all the employees, or (b) Sam directs everyone to lie and they all just nod along without pushing back, whistleblow…

I really think you are missing the point and the frustration of why people are so hostile to OpenAI. Your defense is kinda irrelevant and very confusing. Why are you defending OpenAI so aggressively? Sam Altman represents OpenAI whether you want him to or not. The market and public perception hinges on his often questionable actions. The CEO’s job is in large part as a salesman. Him posting “ her ” on Twitter to try…

My comments regard the hypotheses that OpenAI conspired to cover up stealing mathematicians’ private progress on Navier-Stokes, stealing Johansson’s voice, and cheating on FrontierMath.

If you disapprove of someone’s tweets or podcasts, that's a different question and I have nothing to say there.

Edit: Apologies for any defensiveness or aggression that came across. I think for me it can be a bummer to see us acting honestly internally, share what happened externally, and still be accused of lying a bunch of times in a row (by different people). But I get it - no one knows the truth, no one is perfectly transparent or free of bias, and it's always good to be skeptical of companies. I'll stop posting in this thread.

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

#843

Post by nmz »

drdaeman wrote: post #556
nmz wrote: post #453

If they didn't care about the artists, why would they care about academia?

Two completely different stories. One is public data scraping, another is private conversation scraping (where they're a first-party to the conversation). The key difference is that in the former case, no one made any promises, in the latter an explicit promise was made that data is not used for training (assuming opt-out).

Just because you post on the internet doesn't mean its public, each company has a privacy policy, of which nobody "opted in" for LLM use either when they signed up, they may have opted in for targeted ads, but not LLMs or a virtual recreation of your likeness, skills or persona. I don't remember reading that anywhere in any TOS or privacy policy.

So, it is the exact same story, plagiarism from the plagiarism machine.

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

#844

Post by soundworlds »

tedsanders wrote: post #487
jjwiseman wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We were also curious and we looked further into this. We've determined it was impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training. This goes beyond what we said earlier, when we were less sure. If prompts were submitted earlier than that and training was not opted out, there may be a chance they made their way into our training pipeline i…

Even if OpenAI didn't use their training data, they heard about one of their customers working on the problem of their career, and then undermined them.

Does OpenAI just see this as fair game?

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

#845

Post by csallen »

wiei wrote: post #651
csallen wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This PR stunt by OpenAI may go down in history as the thing that finally broke them for good. ~0% chance of this happening

Nah not 0%. But firms will start paying attention and the likelihood is we will see revenue's stagnate (not growing as fast) in short order as a result of it. When people start having to be careful over a lot of stuff, they'll decide not to use it in the first place.

> Inside just about every company on the planet are conversations this week revisiting the idea of giving these labs access to ANY data

This claim is just so dramatically far from the truth that it's hard to believe y'all aren't living in a fantasy land. This seems much more aligned with the world this commenter wants to exist rather than the world that actually does exist.

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

#846

Post by CrazyStat »

tedsanders wrote: post #842
Eufrat wrote: post #840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think you are missing the point and the frustration of why people are so hostile to OpenAI. Your defense is kinda irrelevant and very confusing. Why are you defending OpenAI so aggressively? Sam Altman represents OpenAI whether you want him to or not. The market and public perception hinges on his often questionable actions. The CEO’s job is in large part as a salesman. Him posting “ her ” on Twitter to try…

My comments regard the hypotheses that OpenAI conspired to cover up stealing mathematicians’ private progress on Navier-Stokes, stealing Johansson’s voice, and cheating on FrontierMath. If you disapprove of someone’s tweets or podcasts, that's a different question and I have nothing to say there. Edit: Apologies for any defensiveness or aggression that came across. I think for me it can be a bummer to see us acting h…

You can claim you’re acting honestly all day long but you still have a CEO with a long-standing reputation for lying.

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

#847

Post by sk4rekr0w »

anfogoat wrote: post #819
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?

New York Times article covering the situation

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/science/tristan-buckmaste...

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

#849

Post by atomicthumbs »

Eufrat wrote: post #840
tedsanders wrote: post #835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sam is not OpenAI. He's not the one who worked on voice mode, and he's not the one who worked on FrontierMath (I know both groups of people). If you believe Sam has caused OpenAI to lie about these for years, you either have to believe (a) Sam does all the work and keeps the incriminating details hidden all the employees, or (b) Sam directs everyone to lie and they all just nod along without pushing back, whistleblow…

I really think you are missing the point and the frustration of why people are so hostile to OpenAI. Your defense is kinda irrelevant and very confusing. Why are you defending OpenAI so aggressively? Sam Altman represents OpenAI whether you want him to or not. The market and public perception hinges on his often questionable actions. The CEO’s job is in large part as a salesman. Him posting “ her ” on Twitter to try…

he's defending it because they pay his salary

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

#850

Post by sk4rekr0w »

golly_ned wrote: post #748
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.

Where did OpenAI say this? And it still leaves open the question of the prompt itself, which can just as easily encode information about the same knowledge.

New York Times article covering the situation, posted link in another reply.
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