OK, good to know (if they can be trusted - Altman clearly is a liar), but it doesn't really change the big picture much.

1) OpenAI by their own admission, only re-tackled Navier-Stokes because they heard it had already been solved (but not yet published). This isn't advancing science or helping the mathematical community, this is just being a dick.

2) OpenAI, specifically Sebastien Brubeck, then threaten to "not be nice" and "ruin the career" of one of the mathematicians whose work they had succeeded in duplicating, unless he agreed (which he refused to do) that his collaborator, an Anthropic employee, was not named. This is not only against mathematical norms of credit assignment, it is also being a pathetic human being.

OpenAI would have you believe this result shows how powerful their mystery better-than-Astra model is, but the reality here is that this model needed 10,000 agents, $20M of compute, and the assistance of a whole team of people at OpenAI, to replicate (then exceed) the work that just took two people, with some academic grants as an AI spending budget to achieve (a few $100K - listed below).

https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/

I'd say advantage humans this time. Better luck next time OpenAI - and if you don't want unfavorable comparisons then maybe choose to work on problems that have not been solved yet, and that humans are NOT making nice progress on.

Is there a reason they scoped that so narrowly to Buckmaster/codex/2 months

two people worked on this for a year before the breakthrough. Perhaps that earlier work reduced the search space sufficiently to brute force the problem with 10,000 agents?

Apart from the well-known dubious position of OpenAI wrt truth, the prompts/inputs do mot include the outputs.

You can train on a sequence of outputs. In the end, OpenAI outputs are OpenAI's property.

You can learn a lot from a single side of a conversation.

It seems logical since if one used chats in train, one would expect that there would be a delay before their use to get them the form appropriate for batch learning.

The only way the chat could have been used would be for Open AI to baldly violate their policies.

That said, sometimes it take very little information to point someone in a given direction, "I'm working on Navier-Stokes" said by someone with a given specialization might itself be very useful information.

This is literally "We have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing"

Why should we trust them?