alt Hacker NewsOpenAI might have stolen another major proof
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https://mathstodon.xyz/@andreasthom/117240535270608201
I wonder what’s more valuable in our prompts: the raw data or the feedback system that drives the exchange towards a goal.
For a long time it was clearly the former, but now I think it is the latter.
The models have enough knowledge (orders of magnitude more than a human could ever learn) but are now getting better at what to do with it thanks to learning from the decisions that we make in conversations with AI agents.
Doing some research and at this point doing it very much in the open with dates on GitHub so if any AI Lab says they re-discover my exact work it will be obvious that the AI used or was trained on my work. I am guessing anyone in a similar situation is now thinking about how they date their existing work if the math is done, but the proses are not.
This is a really weak claim. The evidence they offer is just "someone somewhere says they had a discussion with AI about the topic at some point".
They don't even claim to have had a proof, only to have been working on it.
All the big AI labs were built on stealing IP; who is surprised that's still how they operate? And who believes, or has ever believed, their promises that your data is private and not logged, etc.?
The big AI labs are not trying to advance humanity, they are in this for the money, and as most (all?) private companies they don't care about ethics at all.
That doesn't mean they can't be useful, or that their products are trash, etc. It just means that they shouldn't ever be trusted. Buyer beware.
Relying on cloud services is a big liability. I'd think twice before feeding data to these LLM cloud products. If you make them a fundamental part of your product / development / workflow, be ready for the eventual moment the pricing and terms change.
This article explains the controversy and the mathematical problem much better than the tweet and toots: https://www.science.org/content/article/how-ai-math-breakthr...
If we put aside the idea of credit for a moment, it sounds like human/AI collaboration is indeed super charging discovery.
It’s crazy to me that companies/researchers share important data with these AI labs, you’re basically giving them your secret sauce which they then share with all of your competitors via training on conversations. At the same time I don’t really know alternatives other than a slightly less than frontier local LLM. Not sure how good they are at math.
Only after reading this post did I learn that my preferred AI trains on my inputs (prompts).
How was I not aware of this before?
I don't get it, but I'm not an academic.
If I dedicated my life to curing whatever, warts... and I'm making progress, but it's slow. And then here comes along this tool (LLM), and I use it, and it accelerates my progress to actually finding some sort of thing that makes warts more prone to being eradicated and then the lab throws a couple of million dollars of computes and lo and behold they eliminated warts. If I leave my ego and identity aside, which of course is hard for humans, wouldn't I be glad that warts is cured?
As a software developer that contributed to open source. Yeah. My code is there. It was the most beautiful code ever written and the labs stole it from me. And now they use it to progress much faster than I ever could. OK. Whatever. It's a tool. I solve problems. Can't I move on from this wart to the next?
To me, and I know this is gonna get me some heat, it just sounds like academics having their identity ruffled and turning their back to progress in the fields that they chose just because they don't get to play their little decades long of coffee, papers and ultimately identity politics.
Edit: never got to negative so fast on this board haha. This board is unfortunately turning, or has turned, to Reddit.
I'm genuinely surprised that more people - including this mathematician in particular - don't untick the "improve the model for everyone" box. Unless the suggestion is that OpenAI ignore this preference?
Theft machines be thieving.
I want bunch of lawsuits, because the way things are described now produces perverse initiatives like try to discuss every possible idea that comes to mind with llm and if any of it works later claim the llm stole it.
I would like to see chat logs etc and understand how much of a progress was done by human.
But China steals our AI!!!!!!
people seem to miss tge point of this. The problem isn't about credit, its about portraying these models as more competant than they really are. It fuels idiotic statements like jensen huangs recent "agi achieved" statement, which fuels an already dangerous financial fire.
Gonna need grants for local models. Its happening. OpenAI and Anthropic models are powerful but are rapidly approaching the good ol trust thermocline.
Some mathematicians I know who've been following this have realized that they'd all gotten some emails from people they now know to be affiliated with OpenAI/Anthropic asking questions about their research in a way that seemed like scooping attempts.
Also, a lot of my mathematicians buddies have reported students basically asking if it's worth ever doing grad school for pure math, and even very motivated students are looking for other options now. It's not because they aren't passionate about it, it's that they don't want to work for another half decade or more just to have to start their careers all over.
All of this so that OpenAI and Anthropic can get into math result dick measuring to gas up their IPOs. Sickening.
The real annoying thing it seems is mostly that openai is presumably doing this for internal reasons and this marginally increases the cost to users with no real gain.
It would be one thing to gain from it but removing prestige wins from customers AND reducing compute support just feels like being ultra mean if you zoom out.
If this was racing to cure cancer ahead of researchers we wouldn't be writing about this on HN.
TL/DR: Mathematician opted out of training on 29-JUN and asked OpenAI whether they trained on his data and was told that it "did not happen" but it clearly did.
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It is suspicious that OpenAI decided to generate 300 billion output tokens from a model still in training, right after learning there was a credible chance that a major math proof was in that model’s training data. Obviously there are reasonably plausible explanations for each step, but it does sort of feel like parallel construction.