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  • Hacker News
  • Can anyone explain to me why Tristan simply didn't go to settings page and turn off the thing? Especially when Levent was collaborating with him and Levent is completely aware of how the training data is used and the implications thereby?

    If it is oversight, then that's ok and OpenAI can volunteer to make him the lead author which they did. But he's pissed that OpenAI is not letting Levent as well, who had access to internal Anthropic models. So this guy thinks

    1. oh my bad i forgot to turn off the consent thing in settings page

    2. also i'll collaborate with a literal Anthropic employee who has access to their internal models

    3. i'll also reject OpenAI's deal to be the lead author because i want an employee of the competitor to be a part of it

    I don't get the mindset.

    by simianwords
  • > Can anyone explain to me why Tristan simply didn't go to settings page and turn off the thing?

    Maybe they were fine with contributing training data when their threat model didn't include the case of "OpenAI gets wind of our research and attempts to front-run us"?

    by dogleash
  • >simply didn't go to settings page and turn off the thing

    companies famously always honor those settings!

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/14/google-lo...

    https://techhq.com/news/amazon-and-microsoft-both-fined-mill...

    by rasz
  • > our hypodissipative result (which is not public), but as I understand it part of their training data

    How did it become part of their training data if it wasn't public? /confused

    by japgolly
  • One of the researchers was using the product. They train on your private interactions unless you explicitly opt out in the settings.
    by WoodenChair
  • It's baseless speculation and unfounded accusations of plagarism. OpenAI now categorically denies this: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/science/tristan-buckmaste...

    “We can say categorically that it is impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training.”

    “After investigating, we can say with full confidence that no user inputs past July 3rd could have influenced this system in any way.”

    Buckmaster reached the key result on August 15, far after the training cutoff.

    by tristanj
  • This is speculation right now. The idea would be that if someone used the product and granted training rights, which is the default for many subscription levels, then some knowledge would have been imparted into the general weights of the new model.

    oAI has made clear they did not specifically pull in any user data to context for this run.

    by vessenes
  • This post is out of date. OpenAI quietly updated the references on their paper earlier today and added several authors.
    by tristanj
  • The main claim, that "they do not seem to have any mathematicians capable of understanding what they put out", was also corroborated by Sebastien (OpenAI) who explained they don't have any experts on Navier-Stokes.
    by kzrdude
  • The problem is that eventually, there will be no humans who can follow the results AI will give. That’s the endgame for this tech: to produce knowledge at speeds and quality beyond what we can
    by tetrisgm
  • In certain, more complex, software engineering domains this almost became true as of today.
    by menaerus
  • Yeah, but then you can use another round of AI to break these things down to crayon level, no?

    Or is it just all PFM? (Pure, Fanciful Magic)

    by smitty1e
  • Which asks the question of what knowledge is. Can knowledge be super human ? Or is knowledge a human matter ? If so (like i believe), then what those ai labs are doing is far from the end of the story. Because the goal of science is not to produce a certificate of something, but more to produce an explanation that can fit in a human brain, that can be reasoned on, and that can be retargeted. In this sense, producing a million lines proof is not really producing knowledge, even less so doing science.
    by uargos
  • That’s the prevailing narrative, but I think this controversy calls it into question to some extent. If the OpenAI result wouldn’t have been possible without experts seeding the training data with feedback on promising solution routes, there’s less reason to believe this, IMO. More information and transparency is needed
    by rsfern
  • Loosely related, you may want to check your own privacy settings at

    https://chatgpt.com/codex/cloud/settings/data#settings/DataC...

    https://claude.ai/new#settings/data-privacy-controls

    I just realized I've been happily "improving the model for everyone"...

    by oefrha
  • That OpenAI setting helps, but there is a better way to do it. To completely opt-out of training, submit a request via the OpenAI privacy portal.

    Visit this website https://privacy.openai.com/policies/en/ , click "Make a Privacy Request", choose "Do not train on my content", and complete the form. That submits a formal objection to training on your data, as required by GDPR/your local legislation.

    by tristanj