- the OpenAI researchers claimed that they had "just told it to work on the problem" with little human input - in fact, they had a whole team working on it - and used, among other things, the work of third party human researchers to drive the work - then went silent when asked to coordinate on the publication
Just from this document (which is of course only one side of the story) it really sounds like OpenAI was planning to publish and say "we just told the model to try harder and it solved a Millennium problem!". Not great if true.
tristanj•22m ago
It seems there is much background drama happening, the author claims OpenAI was working on the same problems as them. Additionally, OpenAI has solved a millennium problem and is sitting on the result.
"I was told that an internal OpenAI model had produced a proof of finite time blowup for the forced Navier-Stokes equations."
Because they were working on the same problems, they were coordinating with OpenAI regarding a publishing timeline, but could not come to an agreement, hence they published first.
The post is missing context from both sides, and this isn't my field, hopefully someone else can unpack what's happening here.
akersten•13m ago
Skimming the PDFs it seems much more dramatic than that? It sounds like at least one of them is concerned OpenAI "solved" the problem by having their internal model use the chats of the independent researchers and want to claim the credit instead? I don't know. The tone is pretty accusational though:
> the one Levent and I had quietly chosen to attack. Almost nobody else I know of was working on it. It is not the direction one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement. When I heard “forced,” it was a bright red flag.
> I was shown a prompt and told the internal research model had simply been given the problem statement. Levent had been told by Sebastien “very little human input” had been used. This turned out not to be true. Over the course of the call, as members of their team sent Sebastien corrections and details over their internal chat, it emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem, that this was one of a number of things that was tried, that work had started on the unforced problem, that the team first set the model on easier problems, including Euler, that even the prompt that had been shown to me had been written by prompting Codex, and that an insane amount of compute had been used.
> I asked when the first prompt had been sent by them. This question was not answered directly by OpenAI for some time. Eventually it was agreed that it had been sent in the past few days, after information about our work had reached OpenAI.
> I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer. [0]
[0]: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf
dumberquestions•7m ago
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the work involved here is not the actual millennium problem, but it concerns versions with an added external force that the author thinks is a path that may help toward solving the harder unforced problem.