alt Hacker NewsWhat else can they declare really? Yeah the model has training data from previous attempts. Alpöge and Buckmaster also similarly benefited from attempts before theirs.
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> What else can they declare really?
Oh I don't know, maybe something like this?
"Given how seriously this would violate the most fundamental of academic standards, as well as taint the claimed capability behind this result, we take this issue very seriously, and we're launching a probe into identifying whether any of their research artifacts have entered our training set. We have further begun making changes to our UI/UX on all our surfaces, so that it is always clear whether any particular chat, or other user artifact, is eligible for being trained on."
This is desperate. They were expressly operating within a program. OpenAI isn't going to recover from this
They could have thought about the problem for like 2 minutes and not done this! I think that literally any academic mathematician could have explained to them, had they asked, why it is considered extraordinarily rude to react to rumors of research progress by desperately rushing to get there first.
In OpenAI's case, if they were genuinely unsure, they wouldn't have said anything. "We cannot rule out" means they absolutely 100% for-sure did look at the existing prompts and bootstrapped from that, and they are trying to get ahead of the disclosure with this weasel-wording.
I don't think OAI should be given the benefit of doubt. They are doing the research equivalent of front-running. Knowing where to look is one of the main challenges in research. Tristan's argument from his essay was that it is hard to brute force with a vanilla prompt (even for seasoned mathematicians) unless you knew very specifically what to mention i.e the search space would have been intractable even for OAI's compute budget.
"deidentified data" isn't much to go by. Say I prompted the internal model this way - "Hey there's a solution to a unsolved problem X. The solution uses a less known Method Y so don't bother wasting time with the usual methods. Take papers A, B and C as references. Oh btw, here's the last year's worth of data of all prompt sessions that mention this problem. Pay special attention to the ones that mention Method Y and sub-keywords Z,W".
This is obviously all speculation but the timing is very suspect. If OAI actually did this (and I suspect whatever they did is pretty much close to this), I think it is highly unethical.