Because it's mostly not true. It is likely that it used the professors work, but the professor did not have a solution. It came up with new insights that solved the problem. Even the humans from the professors side said so.

According to OpenAI the cut off date for user data was too early for that (one sided evidence, so I'll give this partial consideration).

The NYU professor was solving a different problem (no viscosity, aka the Euler equations). This is a big difference.

The NYU professors' blowup construction was fundamentally not the same, it was a donut with a cascade of smaller and smaller vortexes driven by each other. OpenAI has that picture they made but its inwards spiraling and speeding up vortex.

My overall opinion is that calling the work plagiarized is really underselling what the AI accomplished. It's like full on cope.

In particular, Buckmaster's main claim to plagiarism is this:

> “Almost nobody was seriously developing this particular constructive program for realizing C/D, and then OpenAI appeared in essentially the same general part of the landscape immediately after hearing about our progress.”

What this fails to realize, is that this only points to plagiarism if the counterparty isn't AI. They had actually launched teams on all cases in parallel.