You'll say, "Don't tell anyone", which they will ignore because they get a rush and perceived status by sharing it. So then they tell someone, along with "Don't tell anyone", etc.
It's a small enough world (both in academic math, one at Anthropic) that you get to OAI in very few hops.
So in general it's pretty safe to talk generally about whatever you're doing.
Them being assholes, trying to exclude an author just because he worked at Anthropic, shows the kind of culture within (that part of) their organization. The focus wasn't on supporting academics or expanding research. It was on getting great marketing.
If they had to burn millions of dollars solving a problem _that they thought was already being solved_ to do so, they'd do it.
That aspect alone would/should be unthinkable to any serious academic. Authorship reflects who did the work and changing it for business competition reasons should be a red flag for multiple different reasons. They include, the sheer tactlessness of treating a major theoretical advancement as a competitive posturing first, the norms of academia second, and all the misunderstandings of the culture of the disciplines culture that people will now suspect are hiding beneath the visible surface (insert topography joke).
Math as a field is fairly unique even in how they list authorship. It was long the norm that authorship to be alphabetical because the idea of first, second, senior etc authorship is harder to define than many other fields.
“The stated rationale for alphabetical order is that it treats co-authorship as intellectually joint work: every listed author’s name carries equal weight, and no one has to negotiate, or be seen to negotiate, over billing. That is a genuine advantage over position-coded conventions, where disputes over who is “first author” are one of the most common sources of authorship conflict in fields that use them” [0]
That norm is changing, slowly, but one option people are pursuing is notable: randomized author order. Their is a perception that alphabetical is too biased…that’s the world OpenAI is stepping into when they make that offer of authorship to one scholar with a demand that he exclude his partner.
I can’t speak to the facts of anything else in this, but if a grad student came to me and said someone made them that offer, I would tell them to run and if they were brave report it.
[0] a to the point lay description of the history of math authorship can be found here: https://casrai.org/guides/mathematics-alphabetical-authorshi...
I say that as a mathematician (on paper) who perhaps surprisingly doesn’t give a crap about the problem itself.
If an entirely new problem, within a new field of mathematics were to appear tomorrow, I highly doubt an LLM would be useful at all on their own. Is this the «ultimate ASI test»?
However, how to we know the next field of mathematics isn't a novel combinations of several other sub-fields? That level of mathematics would be indistinguishable from magic to most people and so in their eyes the GPT did something truly inventive.
It is able to contribute code, but maybe not good code.
It's the same in math: it's able to solve problems, but not necessarily in a good way with a human readable code.
Math papers are a lot like software:
- theorems are like API
- lemmata like internal/private function API
- definitions are like types
- the proofs are the implementation
The proofs of ChatGPT are not necessarily readable or maintainable.
What I cannot reconcile is the timeline and the concern in this specific case.
I don’t think training pipelines are anything close to the level of continuous training needed to incorporate Aug 15th ideas into a model that generates a breakthrough early Sept. Either OpenAI nakedly had someone with mathematical understanding dig into a specific user’s chats (a massive red flag) or this really is poor handling of a more classic parallel discovery situation (with one party clearly having worked on it longer)
> While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models
I mean... yeah? What do you expect? What else can they say? How could you prove a negative in this case? I do not want to comment on specific OAI employee chat messages, but on the actual OAI discovery here.
So what they are saying is that they don't have zero retention.
I've observed this exact effect last week. I made a discovery regarding a stepwise performance improvement in a codebase. I shared the benchmark results with a peer and within 12 hours they replicated the same. We had both been looking for this for years.
I think giving someone hope that an answer exists might as well be the same thing as giving them the answer these days. Competition is a hell of a drug, and frontier LLMs aggressively compound that energy.
If you read the history of major scientific discoveries, this has been the case for a long time. There are many things that were independently discovered by different people at nearly the same time.
[1]: https://www.sqlai.ai
OpenAI can easily identify these outstanding human behind their accounts. Human in OpenAI constantly check their logs for breakthrough. When they find something interesting, they brute force the result using their massive computing power.
No LLM is even needed.
What do you mean, as OpenAI employee, you cannot tell that his work has entered the training data ?
But also correct me if I'm wrong, if the two mathematician were really close to finish this problem, and their conversation were used by OpenAI, shouldn't the Agent have succeeded way faster/efficiently instead of using "4.9 million messages and used about 300 billion output tokens."
https://xcancel.com/SebastienBubeck/status/20973794116915163...
tosh•42m ago
> If I'm running Codex and one of my API keys accidentally gets consumed in the context, what are the chances that someone else might ask for an API key in the future and get mine back? (I asked someone at OpenAI once and they called this the "regurgitation" problem and assured me that they take great pains to prevent that... but wouldn't describe how.)
> If I brainstorm with ChatGPT about potential new directions for my company, what's the chance that information might be exposed to a competitor in six months' time who asks "what might company X plan to do next"?
> My new preferred hypothetical for this is:
> If I use ChatGPT to help me partially solve a Millennium Prize problem, what are the chances that my work will influence training such that a later model helps someone else solve it first?
weinzierl•11m ago