Part of The AI Control Crisis · 11 stories · since Sep 4 · newest 29m ago
OpenAI's math scoops spark mathematician revolt over 'stolen' proofsOpenAI drops sponsorship of Caltech's AI math hackathon
5 Sep 10 6:46 PM · 14d ago · 4 articles · 9 posts · 28 comments · 5 sources · development 5 of 8
After an open letter from Caltech mathematicians warning of 'destructive impacts,' OpenAI withdraws as sponsor of a hackathon where participants use AI to attack research problems, amid criticism of 'slop mathematics.'
“is likely to have destructive impacts for the mathematical community”
Caltech mathematiciansTristan Buckmaster NYU mathematics professorLevent Alpöge Mathematician, Buckmaster's collaboratorAndreas Thom MathematicianOpenAI AI companyJames Robinson Mathematician, University of Warwick
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What was reported 5 claims about this development
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first by NYT, 14d ago · also Understanding AI, NYT Science
1 more headline
- OpenAI spent millions to solve this famous math problem — mathematicians are furious Understanding AI · 14d ago
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first by Mastodon, 13d ago · also Gizmodo
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first by Mastodon, 14d ago · also Business Insider
1 more headline
- OpenAI pulls out of Caltech math hackathon after mathematicians issue open letter criticizing AI math 'slop' Business Insider · 14d ago
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1 outlet Open Letter about the Mathathon
first by Proofs and Prompts, 13d ago
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first by The Rundown AI, 16d ago
What people said 24 voices · best of 30 · verbatim
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I think OpenAI and Anthropic are slowly feeling the pressure to GET SOME $$ or a plan for some $$ — they need to somehow generate some NETWORK EFFECTS and LOCK-IN. Without that there's no stability: selling ad hoc one-offs is much much too quaint! This is dawning on them like it dawned on Google when they stopped not being evil. Need... to…
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“He published a public statement this week accusing the AI company of trying to gazump him and his research partner Levent Alpöge, from # OpenAI 's rival # Anthropic , after hearing they were close to solving the problem. Professor Buckmaster also said the company offered to let write up their solution if he took his partner's name off the…
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OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem, says NYU mathematician | TechCrunch
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These can all be true at once:1. OpenAI's internal model benefited from the reasoning in Alpöge and Buckmaster's Codex sessions through de-identified usage data.2. OpenAI's model seems to have surpassed Alpöge and Buckmaster's results and produced a field-defining proof. If verified, this work would be the first AI resolution of a Millennium Prize…
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> Provenance is hard to trackRight, which is going to open a lot of doors to a lot of questions.I don't think there's any legal ramifications on this, just ethical ones about when and how you publish research, but it's yet another point in favor of "if provenance is hard to track, should we be using this for things where it needs to be".Obviously…
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Who cares. the biggest thing about this is that its still brute force in a verifiable domain, and that it was still a human set goal.I also don't believe it much practical use, unless I'm mistaken, approximations of Navier stokes have been available for a long time to whatever precision you need.I'm not a complete disbeliever by any stretch , and…
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All players in this space are doing the same thing with all data, no surprise here. They are stealing IP across the board with support on high to allow it: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.64...IMO, it is extremely naive to trust these black box remote service API calls, especially at an institution that can provide $$$…
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The irony is that OpenAI got into this trouble only because they tried to play "nice". They told Buckmaster that he could publish the final result as the author as long as he removed Alpöge from the author list. They wanted to give Buckmaster a chance to be the one solved N-S problem.While this behavior is highly questionable, if OpenAI just…
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This is just mental illness at this point. I don't blame the mathematicians that have found a way to get attention from the mainstream press for once, but we should not fall for it here.1. No one but OpenAI has produced a proof of NS so these accusations of plagiarism are pretty embarrassing. It reminds me of the line from the Social Network: "If…
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Isn’t that the whole spiel of these things, you run all kind of text and other data through it and it kind of remembers it and learns from it then it spouts it back out like a human would. Makes sense to me that a training run based on conversations that were fed into the system by users is used to learn from these so the model will spot the…
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It's kind of insane how much we trust companies to safeguard our personal data when they're so heavily incentivized to use it for their own profit. Theft of customer data is punished so rarely and so leniently that companies aren't even particularly worried about getting caught anymore. We have overwhelming evidence that promises to keep data safe…
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I think people probably assume that openai / anthropics use of their data is probably like google's """limited""" use, in the sense that historically google wouldn't trivially be able to just take something from google cloud or someone's search history and insta-convert into some competing project... But LLMs are quite strong at approximately…
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Most people here are missing the forest for the trees.We live in a society where phones and internet providers and websites all collect an incredible amount of data about everywhere you go, what you do, and what you think. In the US, we have very few digital rights.We are building a society where a trillion dollar company can aggregate all this…
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I think this move by OpenAI is crazy. At best, if all unconfirmed accusations are unfounded, they still heard a rumour that someone had solved a huge million dollar problem and was about to make a name for themselves. Then, they decided this was a good opportunity to pour millions of dollars into trying to snag the glory while the researchers were…
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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…
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The problem here is that OAI (and others) pretend or claim that this is uncharted legal territory, where in fact it is very simple. We have a machine that is fed data, and produces new data as a result. If that new data depends (in any way) on the fed data, then from a legal viewpoint it is derived from that data.Whether they anthropomorphize the…
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This goes beyond math. The external appearance is that OpenAI negligently or intentionally used user data against a user’s interests in a potentially career-altering way… for the marketing bump of an AI proof. The fact that it probably wasn’t intentional is irrelevant. Trust has been lost and this will ripple into communities where no one has…
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Then there's the possibility of indirect training via modern spy devices ("smart" IoT devices like LG TV's) feeding the transcribed ambient conversation data for summarization to an agent [0].[0]:
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> you would hope OpenAI has very good tools for this, but a full data trail of all inputs is difficult to trace through.They have a financial incentive not to track any of this, so why would they?OpenAI’s entire business model is predicated on stealing other people’s work and selling it to the masses.
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"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.
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I would like an unambiguously clear statement from OpenAI as to what they do with data collected from non-business accounts when:(a) The data controls setting to train on the data is unchecked.(b) The privacy controls opt-out has been submitted.(c) Both.
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I am not using any of these AI tools. I thought it was basically given that any single thing you write in these systems also used by the companies. On the other hand now I understand why there are so much projects about hosting AI systems locally.
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The fact than OAI hasn’t come out with an statement firmly denying this angle is getting a little awkward.Suggest that it’s either straight true or it is flowing in in a way that prohibits them from confidently declaring otherwise.
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I think it seems sensible to _assume_ anything the LLM reads (if you aren't inferencing it) has a chance of ending up in some database somewhere. Regardless of whether you trust the other party its a sensible thing to plan around.
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