alt Hacker NewsOpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem
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Setting aside the disagreement, I was very interested to see the net pricing of the discovery:
> All told, the week-long effort consumed 300 billion output tokens — $22.5 million worth of compute, if charged at current Astra rates.
> The Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem is one of the seven Millennium Prize problems — a set of major unsolved math problems, each carrying a $1 million bounty
I know openAI isn't solving these problems in order to make profit, but it's interesting to guess how close we are to these things becoming profitable. Eg, if you think their public pricing for Astra is ~2x as expensive as their internal price, then they lost ~10M on net for this proof. That's not profitable, but it is much better than I would have expected, which is exciting for the other Millennium prize problems! Of course the fundamental approach (which they may have plagiarized from Buckmaster and Alpoge) might have added cost to that as well. Nonetheless, I wouldn't be too surprised if they're all solved within the next 3 years!
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117237320796901560
Terrence Tao recently published an interesting take that zooms out from the details of the Navier Stokes drama.
Its an interesting observation he makes, because it is not dissimilar from the relatively common phenomenon of one academic lab getting scooped by another lab (usually by coincidence).
OpenAI has a lot of explaining to do here.
The “least worst” representation of the course of events is that their researchers are just jerks, and not behaving in a manner that’s considered acceptable in the research community.
Other alleged scenarios just go downhill from there.
The most sympathetic interpretation possible of the events for OAI is that they learned two mathematicians were closing in on a solution and decided to throw all of their weight behind getting there first, which honestly still doesn’t paint them in a particularly positive light.
I feel like this whole thing hinges on one point. OAI says[0]:
> However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs unforced).
How true is this?
If the implied statement is true (i.e. OAI couldn't have stolen results because the results were so different anyways), then I feel like it's pretty clear that OAI solved the problem on their own, and offering some amount of credit to Tristan and Levent is generous. Though on the other hand it's dirty to have even attempted a scoop in the first place.
If the implied statement is false, and Tristan/Levent's results are a substantial portion of the solution to the millennium problem, then it's probably unintentional but clear plagiarism. I think it's plausible to assume that OAI has trained their models on Tristan's codex conversations, and so regardless of legal ownership, the academic ownership definitely includes Tristan and Levent.
The rest of the drama (individual statements and wordings, e.g. by Sebastien) seems like a bit of a red herring. Worth noting, but not worth basing conclusive judgements on regarding academic misconduct. Regardless, OAI does not seem like the good guys.
The saddest part of this is no one actually cares about the proof itself.
Does it prove what it claims to prove? Were new mathematics invented? Can this be applied to other areas?
I don’t have a problem with labs solving hard problems if they can, but they could at least pretend to care more about the problems and less about the marketing opportunity.
Statement from Tristan: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605915
Statement from OpenAI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613262
Even through the lack of ethics here and there and mistakes - I think the major headline is that talented people are collaborating with AI to achieve impressive results. It’s shrouded in competitive mistakes of judgment. But it’s an existence proof for collaborating with AI and achieving incredible things.
Open ai will do everything it can to convince us it’s unlikable and fulling an optional worse version of AI that we don’t want the world to be. Altman is so Zuckey
Who on earth reads 2 pages of an all-text article, and decides at that point “you know what, I want to watch a video; oh good, here is the article in video form, just when I needed it!”?
> It is not the direction one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement.
Such a satisfying quote.
I think the context is really important.
OpenAI has been behind in the AI race since last November. They have been playing catch-up.
They recently released Astra and declared it is AGI. Now they are desperate for anything they can use as evidence for that claim.
In other words: they had clear motive to do anything they could to steal the glory from prominent mathematicians who worked hard on this problem and solved it. And they also cannot prove that said mathematician's data was not accessed by either the model or the OAI users prompting the model.
Beware everyone working on ground breaking research, keep your research secret from openAI or they might spend 22$ million worth of tokens just to beat you to the finish line, while possibly abusing your user data for training.
See also https://x.com/roelof_vandijk/status/2097219223470629038 So sad that the thread on OpenAI claiming to have solved it first gets so much attention while the posts of Tristan get snowed under.
Shocking, I really expected more from the "totally legitimate startup" planning a $2 trillion IPO with their bottomless money pit. I genuinely assumed that the company credibly accused of stealing from Apple in the most ham-fised way possible would have some kind of guiding ethical principles. At the very least the paragon of decency that is Sam Altman would have stopped this.
Get ready, bag-holders on index-tracking funds... you're about to lose your shirts.
Who is "Bubeck"? The article doesn't introduce him. Or give his name. Same with "Luis" and "Diego".
I am supposing it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9bastien_Bubeck
This is terrible:
When Buckmaster pushed to make the dispute public, he says that Bubeck replied: “Why would you ruin your career?” Buckmaster says that when he pushed back, Bubeck followed up with: “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”