I'm not even sure what to say to this, but I think this should be widely known if it is indeed what happened.
So the money in nerdy frontier math is very little. The money in Big AI is very very much.
So the deal is this: We will pay an army of you guys very well and you will get to work on your favorite problems. The only thing is if you find something you will have to credit the Machine God.
Do you think you can handle that?
Time will almost certainly reveal a lot more about the drama and the related ethics, but let's get excited about the actual breakthrough as well!
OpenAI looked at user data, stole world class researchers' work, and then tried to threaten those researchers to do what would make their corporation profit (which they would anyways!).
Imagine you have been working on a terribly difficult math problem for a decade. This is a result you have spent years on, and what you will likely be remembered for. And to have some punk from OpenAI lie to you, threaten you, and tell you that they are willing to go on the record that you "deserved" it? What is this, the Godfather?
If OpenAI solved Navier-Stokes, that is an astounding result! - yet they'll still be remembered as those who thought credit was more important than results. That winning was more important than collaboration. If this is true, they're burning any trust left with academia.
OpenAI tried to collaborate and share the results together with a fixed timeline, to avoid this mess but it was inevitable. There is a conflict of interest, where the other researcher works at Anthropic, who will also try to take credit.
Where they may be in the wrong is if they took user data regarding the problem, how will we know if they did or not?
"Oops! We really did mean it when we said we wouldn't train on your data. Our models are just so good they decided to anyway."
I guess this is true in more ways than one. Kasparov famously accused IBM of cheating during the match, by spying on his preparation.
Mathematical explanation by Terrance Tao: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117233527638291447
It seems there is much background drama behind this, and this is what I've pieced together of what happened:
Over the past year, Buckmaster and Alpöge have been using AI to work on fluid dynamics maths problems. Alpöge works at Anthropic, which will cause future issues.
In mid-August, they found a counterexample for a simpler version of the Navier-Stokes problem. They spend the next few weeks preparing their paper.
In early September, rumors start spreading on X that Anthropic has solved a Millennium prize problem (and that it's Navier-Stokes). Buckmaster reaches out to OpenAI to explain this is their own personal research, not an Anthropic project.
A few days later, OpenAI gets back to him, and tells him an internal model found has a counterexample for Navier–Stokes, potentially worth the $1 million Millennium prize. The proof uses the same method that Buckmaster and Alpöge chose to work on. They don't show him the proof.
Buckmaster pressed them for more details. OpenAI reveals they had an entire team had been working on the problem, and that they started work in the past few days, after the rumors that Anthropic had solved a Millennium prize problem.
Buckmaster says OpenAI talked about a shared publication timeline. They want to Buckmaster to publish first, then give Buckmaster shared credit for the Millennium Prize when they publish the full result. But they want to exclude Alpöge as an author because he works at Anthropic. An agreement is not reached. Buckmaster had been using OpenAI Codex to draft/check his work, and asks if his private AI chats were used to accelerate OpenAI's result.
Buckmaster and Alpöge think they have found a counterexample for Navier-Stokes, but the paper is not yet presentable. It's unclear what date they found this result.
Because of the situation with OpenAI, they published their existing papers earlier than planned (today), alongside this statement announcing they have a tentative result on Navier-Stokes and revealing the OpenAI drama.
The post is missing context from both sides, and this isn't my field, so hopefully someone else can unpack what's happening here.
Skimming the PDFs it seems much more dramatic than that? It sounds like at least one of them is concerned OpenAI "solved" the problem by having their internal model use the chats of the independent researchers and want to claim the credit instead? I don't know. The tone is pretty accusational though:
> the one Levent and I had quietly chosen to attack. Almost nobody else I know of was working on it. It is not the direction one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement. When I heard “forced,” it was a bright red flag.
> I was shown a prompt and told the internal research model had simply been given the problem statement. Levent had been told by Sebastien “very little human input” had been used. This turned out not to be true. Over the course of the call, as members of their team sent Sebastien corrections and details over their internal chat, it emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem, that this was one of a number of things that was tried, that work had started on the unforced problem, that the team first set the model on easier problems, including Euler, that even the prompt that had been shown to me had been written by prompting Codex, and that an insane amount of compute had been used.
> I asked when the first prompt had been sent by them. This question was not answered directly by OpenAI for some time. Eventually it was agreed that it had been sent in the past few days, after information about our work had reached OpenAI.
> I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer. [0]
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the work involved here is not the actual millennium problem, but it concerns versions with an added external force that the author thinks is a path that may help toward solving the harder unforced problem.
The question is whether OpenAI's pursuit of this direction happened spontaneously, or as a result of them learning about Tristan's work somehow. To be clear, while the tone of this post seems quite accusatory, Tristan does not claim to know for sure whether OpenAI unfairly benefited from his work. I am sure OpenAI will have a statement out tomorrow clarifying their position.
If you think these companies are not training on your prompts you are incredibly naive. These models were built by stealing and pirating literally everything they can get their hands on no matter the legality. AI companies are always very specific about what they're not doing - in a way that you can drive a truck through the loopholes
This is significant.
- the OpenAI researchers claimed that they had "just told it to work on the problem" with little human input
- in fact, they had a whole team working on it
- and used, among other things, the work of third party human researchers to drive the work
- then threatened? a researcher who tried to go against theit planned narrative
Just from this document (which is of course only one side of the story) it really sounds like OpenAI was hoping to publish and say "we just told the model to try harder and it solved a Millennium problem!". Not great if true.
This part in particular was especially egregious:
> I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”
Telling OpenAI that Anthropic has apparently solved an important problem but most likely that refers to him and he is using OpenAI models (not Anthropic's)?
And he wants to clarify that with OpenAI in advance? And get a pardon for Anthropic's likely but false press statements?
I dont get it.
[edited] needless to say, the behavior of the OpenAI employee is really despicable
(some drama from good ol' William)
Terry also talks about it https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117234157753860650