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  • Hacker News
  • 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.
    by addandsubtract
  • > It is not the direction one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement.

    Such a satisfying quote.

    by sublinear
  • 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
    by qwerty_clicks
  • 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!

    by pinkmuffinere
  • I would assume they spent similar amounts on the other Millennium problems too. Also, they probably tried it before with older models.
    by qznc
  • This discounts the human breakthroughs needed to get to this point, the cost of the employees working in it, previous attempts, and more.
    by skepticATX
  • > 300 billion output tokens — $22.5 million worth of compute, if charged at current Astra rates.

    This makes the 100 billion tokens (total in/out) I've spent on my project on the $200/mo plan seem like a deal. Wow.

    by timschmidt
  • 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!”?
    by cwillu
  • Me?

    I can read the 2 pages in ~30s or so. How long is the video? 15m? Nah.

    Edit: video is 37 minutes

    by esseph
  • 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.
    by machina_ex_deus
  • The guy is working with an anthropic researcher and they're not using Claude. It just doesn't make sense.
    by incognition
  • Statement from Tristan: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605915

    Statement from OpenAI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613262

    by nairboon
  • https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117237320796901560

    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).

    by biophysboy
  • 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".

    by evilturnip
  • > 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.

    by moregrist
  • 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.
    by dumberquestions
  • 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.
    by jdm2212
  • Who is "Bubeck"? The article doesn't introduce him. Or give his name. Same with "Luis" and "Diego".

    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.”

    by golly_ned
  • The report pdf confirms Sebastian was the Bubeck in question
    by gcr
  • 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.

    https://x.com/dheeraj_nagaraj/status/2097266146445774924

    by DetroitThrow
  • 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.

    [0]: https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

    by hatthew
  • Agree! We have both published solutions now; someone (AI?) should be able to analyze their methods and see how similar they are
    by Hansenq
  • Agree with this framing, but we may find out that the answer is somewhere in the middle. Personally I think it is extremely unlikely that this is straight plagiarism in the sense of the model simply regurgitating training data from prior work by Tristan, but it is very plausible that his work (and others’) was foundational to the breakthrough. What is unfortunate is that the stakes are so high (and no I don’t mean $1M) and the timeline is so compressed.

    I expect a lot more of this kind of drama in the near future.

    by quicklywilliam
  • OpenAI has a lot of explaining to do here.

    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.

    by cmiles8
  • 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?
    by jdm2212