I feel like this whole thing hinges on one point. OAI says[0]:
> However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs unforced).
How true is this?
If the implied statement is true (i.e. OAI couldn't have stolen results because the results were so different anyways), then I feel like it's pretty clear that OAI solved the problem on their own, and offering some amount of credit to Tristan and Levent is generous. Though on the other hand it's dirty to have even attempted a scoop in the first place.
If the implied statement is false, and Tristan/Levent's results are a substantial portion of the solution to the millennium problem, then it's probably unintentional but clear plagiarism. I think it's plausible to assume that OAI has trained their models on Tristan's codex conversations, and so regardless of legal ownership, the academic ownership definitely includes Tristan and Levent.
The rest of the drama (individual statements and wordings, e.g. by Sebastien) seems like a bit of a red herring. Worth noting, but not worth basing conclusive judgements on regarding academic misconduct. Regardless, OAI does not seem like the good guys.
When Buckmaster pushed to make the dispute public, he says that Bubeck replied: “Why would you ruin your career?” Buckmaster says that when he pushed back, Bubeck followed up with: “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”
Given that he has other former collaborators corroborating this horrific behavior, it seems like this a career spanning pattern, and it's interesting to see just how much @sama is willing to lend his support to someone like Bubeck.
Stains an important moment in the history of AI progress for me. The future seems bleak with people like this at the reins.
The “least worst” representation of the course of events is that their researchers are just jerks, and not behaving in a manner that’s considered acceptable in the research community.
Other alleged scenarios just go downhill from there.
It is worth actually reading OpenAI's response, which is basically that they were trying to see if their models could do what Anthropic had already done, and were surprised to discover that (a) Anthropic had not done it at all, and (b) in fact no one else had done it yet. And then they didn't want to give an Anthropic employee coauthor credit for work that OpenAI had done, which idk seems pretty fair?
>were surprised to discover that (a) Anthropic had not done it at all
They were surprised another competitor had not wastefully thrown $20 million+ worth of compute at a problem they had no business solving in the first place?
Why is it wasteful to solve one of the most famous problems in modern mathematics? And why would one particular company have no business solving it in the first place?
Their explanation doesn’t help much and there are a few things working against them:
1. This is not the first time they have done these “hey guys check out this breakthrough!” announcements where others quickly came along and say “hey, not so fast.” (Eg Erdos) So, specifically in maths their reputation is not good.
2. They’re blurring the lines between commercial cutthroat developments and the gentlemen’s code of sorts re what’s acceptable in academic research. They were working from material non-public insights into other research, which is why they even tried to poke at this in the way they did. Doing that without collaborating first was a pretty jerk move no mater how you slice it.
3. There’s still lots of open questions about how novel the solution was and the timing here where this “test” only happened after other researchers say they fed OpenAI models at least part of the solution is a little too convenient to gloss over. OpenAI statements here to date on the matter have been rather fuzzy.
All that combined with OpenAI’s less than stellar reputation on ethics is why folks are reacting the way they are right now.
RE item 2 -- in lab science, it is entirely normal to have competitive-verging-on-adversarial relationships between labs racing to get results first. Mathematicians apparently need to get used to the idea that math is a lab science now.
And that is a good thing! Competition moves us forward much faster than sitting on results to avoid hurting someone's feelings.
Terrence Tao recently published an interesting take that zooms out from the details of the Navier Stokes drama.
Its an interesting observation he makes, because it is not dissimilar from the relatively common phenomenon of one academic lab getting scooped by another lab (usually by coincidence).
This is interesting. He seems to imply that the AI will just provide the solution. He's concerned that the process of getting to that solution is the important bit. But I can see two versions of "process".
A.) The actual steps of the proof, which I assume the AI would provide.
B.) People, while working toward a solution, finding novel properties/methods along the way that open new avenues of research + new open problems.
Does B.) actually happen? Would knowing the solution to a problem stymie the process of finding new open questions? I would assume finding a solution may unlock other problems too. So maybe on balance it's not really bad?
I guess in the end, I'm just making the obvious case "the future is uncertain in the face of AI".
Well the argument is that B is no longer sustainable because of the scenario you describe in A. If you do a bunch of work on Navier Stokes but then OpenAI gets all the press, then what was the point?
> one academic lab getting scooped by another lab (usually by coincidence).
I was with you up to “usually by coincidence”.
There’s a long and sordid history in areas of chemistry and areas of biology of holding up a competing paper in review so you can scoop them. I’m sure it exists in physics as well. Certainly biophysics, but probably most subfields.
Often it’s a famous labs that can steamroll review or even just dump the work into PNAS as a “member contribution.”
At least one author of a famous inorganic chemistry textbook was rumored to do this routinely.
And I know of at least one National Academy member who swore off arxiv prepublication after getting scooped.
None of this makes it all right. But plagiarism and academic theft is old and definitely not always accidental.
I know this happens, but my impression during my phd was that many labs use popular methods to test popular questions, leading to a lot of simultaneous work. You see this in history as well.
The most sympathetic interpretation possible of the events for OAI is that they learned two mathematicians were closing in on a solution and decided to throw all of their weight behind getting there first, which honestly still doesn’t paint them in a particularly positive light.
The most sympathetic interpretation is just what OpenAI actually claims: they thought the other guys already got there, wanted to see if OpenAI could do it too, and were surprised to discover the other guys hadn't gotten there yet.
Spending tens of millions is a lot to see if you could get there too? I realize the internal price is measured in opportunity cost rather than dollars, but still a bit surprising to see
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but it sounds a bit “I was just punching the air— it’s not my fault someone was in the way.” It’s not like it’s impossible, but it doesn’t immediately pass my smell test. I’ll wait until someone close enough to be knowledgeable but has a lesser stake weighs in.
Setting aside the disagreement, I was very interested to see the net pricing of the discovery:
> All told, the week-long effort consumed 300 billion output tokens — $22.5 million worth of compute, if charged at current Astra rates.
> The Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem is one of the seven Millennium Prize problems — a set of major unsolved math problems, each carrying a $1 million bounty
I know openAI isn't solving these problems in order to make profit, but it's interesting to guess how close we are to these things becoming profitable. Eg, if you think their public pricing for Astra is ~2x as expensive as their internal price, then they lost ~10M on net for this proof. That's not profitable, but it is much better than I would have expected, which is exciting for the other Millennium prize problems! Of course the fundamental approach (which they may have plagiarized from Buckmaster and Alpoge) might have added cost to that as well. Nonetheless, I wouldn't be too surprised if they're all solved within the next 3 years!
Even through the lack of ethics here and there and mistakes - I think the major headline is that talented people are collaborating with AI to achieve impressive results. It’s shrouded in competitive mistakes of judgment. But it’s an existence proof for collaborating with AI and achieving incredible things.
OpenAI says they just pointed the AI at the problem:
> Regarding the level of human involvement on our end: although a group of people was involved in our efforts, we collectively had no research-level expertise in fluid dynamics and the Navier-Stokes problem, and therefore were unable to meaningfully contribute to the mathematical content.
Open ai will do everything it can to convince us it’s unlikable and fulling an optional worse version of AI that we don’t want the world to be. Altman is so Zuckey
Who on earth reads 2 pages of an all-text article, and decides at that point “you know what, I want to watch a video; oh good, here is the article in video form, just when I needed it!”?
The saddest part of this is no one actually cares about the proof itself.
Does it prove what it claims to prove? Were new mathematics invented? Can this be applied to other areas?
I don’t have a problem with labs solving hard problems if they can, but they could at least pretend to care more about the problems and less about the marketing opportunity.
I was told their models were SAFE and they focus on SAFETY. Why would they backstab us like this? If not even OpenAI can be safe, who then?! I think it's time we ban open models so this doesn't happen to anyone else.
Beware everyone working on ground breaking research, keep your research secret from openAI or they might spend 22$ million worth of tokens just to beat you to the finish line, while possibly abusing your user data for training.
OpenAI has been behind in the AI race since last November. They have been playing catch-up.
They recently released Astra and declared it is AGI. Now they are desperate for anything they can use as evidence for that claim.
In other words: they had clear motive to do anything they could to steal the glory from prominent mathematicians who worked hard on this problem and solved it. And they also cannot prove that said mathematician's data was not accessed by either the model or the OAI users prompting the model.
Shocking, I really expected more from the "totally legitimate startup" planning a $2 trillion IPO with their bottomless money pit. I genuinely assumed that the company credibly accused of stealing from Apple in the most ham-fised way possible would have some kind of guiding ethical principles. At the very least the paragon of decency that is Sam Altman would have stopped this.
Get ready, bag-holders on index-tracking funds... you're about to lose your shirts.
> However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs unforced).
How true is this?
If the implied statement is true (i.e. OAI couldn't have stolen results because the results were so different anyways), then I feel like it's pretty clear that OAI solved the problem on their own, and offering some amount of credit to Tristan and Levent is generous. Though on the other hand it's dirty to have even attempted a scoop in the first place.
If the implied statement is false, and Tristan/Levent's results are a substantial portion of the solution to the millennium problem, then it's probably unintentional but clear plagiarism. I think it's plausible to assume that OAI has trained their models on Tristan's codex conversations, and so regardless of legal ownership, the academic ownership definitely includes Tristan and Levent.
The rest of the drama (individual statements and wordings, e.g. by Sebastien) seems like a bit of a red herring. Worth noting, but not worth basing conclusive judgements on regarding academic misconduct. Regardless, OAI does not seem like the good guys.
[0]: https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/
I am supposing it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9bastien_Bubeck
This is terrible:
When Buckmaster pushed to make the dispute public, he says that Bubeck replied: “Why would you ruin your career?” Buckmaster says that when he pushed back, Bubeck followed up with: “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”
Stains an important moment in the history of AI progress for me. The future seems bleak with people like this at the reins.
https://x.com/dheeraj_nagaraj/status/2097266146445774924
The “least worst” representation of the course of events is that their researchers are just jerks, and not behaving in a manner that’s considered acceptable in the research community.
Other alleged scenarios just go downhill from there.
They were surprised another competitor had not wastefully thrown $20 million+ worth of compute at a problem they had no business solving in the first place?
That's reaching, imho.
They didn't know what they were doing and they pumped a bunch more carbon into our atmosphere because hubris basically.
Shame on them.
1. This is not the first time they have done these “hey guys check out this breakthrough!” announcements where others quickly came along and say “hey, not so fast.” (Eg Erdos) So, specifically in maths their reputation is not good.
2. They’re blurring the lines between commercial cutthroat developments and the gentlemen’s code of sorts re what’s acceptable in academic research. They were working from material non-public insights into other research, which is why they even tried to poke at this in the way they did. Doing that without collaborating first was a pretty jerk move no mater how you slice it.
3. There’s still lots of open questions about how novel the solution was and the timing here where this “test” only happened after other researchers say they fed OpenAI models at least part of the solution is a little too convenient to gloss over. OpenAI statements here to date on the matter have been rather fuzzy.
All that combined with OpenAI’s less than stellar reputation on ethics is why folks are reacting the way they are right now.
And that is a good thing! Competition moves us forward much faster than sitting on results to avoid hurting someone's feelings.
Terrence Tao recently published an interesting take that zooms out from the details of the Navier Stokes drama.
Its an interesting observation he makes, because it is not dissimilar from the relatively common phenomenon of one academic lab getting scooped by another lab (usually by coincidence).
A.) The actual steps of the proof, which I assume the AI would provide. B.) People, while working toward a solution, finding novel properties/methods along the way that open new avenues of research + new open problems.
Does B.) actually happen? Would knowing the solution to a problem stymie the process of finding new open questions? I would assume finding a solution may unlock other problems too. So maybe on balance it's not really bad?
I guess in the end, I'm just making the obvious case "the future is uncertain in the face of AI".
I was with you up to “usually by coincidence”.
There’s a long and sordid history in areas of chemistry and areas of biology of holding up a competing paper in review so you can scoop them. I’m sure it exists in physics as well. Certainly biophysics, but probably most subfields.
Often it’s a famous labs that can steamroll review or even just dump the work into PNAS as a “member contribution.”
At least one author of a famous inorganic chemistry textbook was rumored to do this routinely.
And I know of at least one National Academy member who swore off arxiv prepublication after getting scooped.
None of this makes it all right. But plagiarism and academic theft is old and definitely not always accidental.
Statement from OpenAI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613262
> All told, the week-long effort consumed 300 billion output tokens — $22.5 million worth of compute, if charged at current Astra rates.
> The Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem is one of the seven Millennium Prize problems — a set of major unsolved math problems, each carrying a $1 million bounty
I know openAI isn't solving these problems in order to make profit, but it's interesting to guess how close we are to these things becoming profitable. Eg, if you think their public pricing for Astra is ~2x as expensive as their internal price, then they lost ~10M on net for this proof. That's not profitable, but it is much better than I would have expected, which is exciting for the other Millennium prize problems! Of course the fundamental approach (which they may have plagiarized from Buckmaster and Alpoge) might have added cost to that as well. Nonetheless, I wouldn't be too surprised if they're all solved within the next 3 years!
> Regarding the level of human involvement on our end: although a group of people was involved in our efforts, we collectively had no research-level expertise in fluid dynamics and the Navier-Stokes problem, and therefore were unable to meaningfully contribute to the mathematical content.
https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379415747342689
I can read the 2 pages in ~30s or so. How long is the video? 15m? Nah.
Edit: video is 37 minutes
Does it prove what it claims to prove? Were new mathematics invented? Can this be applied to other areas?
I don’t have a problem with labs solving hard problems if they can, but they could at least pretend to care more about the problems and less about the marketing opportunity.
Such a satisfying quote.
OpenAI has been behind in the AI race since last November. They have been playing catch-up.
They recently released Astra and declared it is AGI. Now they are desperate for anything they can use as evidence for that claim.
In other words: they had clear motive to do anything they could to steal the glory from prominent mathematicians who worked hard on this problem and solved it. And they also cannot prove that said mathematician's data was not accessed by either the model or the OAI users prompting the model.
Get ready, bag-holders on index-tracking funds... you're about to lose your shirts.
I can't wait to see your short position that will make you rich enough to retire.