But, at least with the Navier-Stokes solution, it's clear [^1] that they learned that Alpöge and Buckmaster were getting close to a solution and learned of the general approach they were taking. Only after learning the secret to cracking the problem did they send the first prompt.
What makes this worse to me is the intention. They intentionally threw $15 million in compute at the problem in order to scoop the result. They intentionally left Buckmaster and Alpöge out of the citations.
Data contamination should be enough to disqualify them from the prize, but I can believe it to be accidental. On the other hand, someone made an intentional decision to scoop the result by throwing money at the problem. That's so much worse.
[^1]: That's the timeline claimed by Buckmaster, and no one from OAI has disputed it.
Do you have any evidence of this? They don't dispute the timeline, but they never said they knew what Levant/Buckmaster were doing.
Which quote in the announcement post provides evidence for the above quote?
- https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/
They do not explicitly admit to knowing about NS specifically, but are extremely explicit that they tried to scoop some potential millennium prize winners.
And from my perspective, if some math folks typing in a few questions to OpenAI provides sufficient training data for OpenAI to solve a big problem... that's amazing! A few conversations/prompts out of the billions that OpenAI trains on lead to this result- that means there is an awful lot of low-hanging fruit that could be exploited cheaply.
In the transcripts, Brubeck is very cagey and evasive about the prompt, when it was supplied, and its contents.
Either they had a pretty good idea that investing this type of money in that compute on a model in training would lead to these specific results, or they gambled with other people's money.
I want to hear about the gambles and expenditures they don't brag about. In America's energy economy, there's finite resources to expend.
> learning the answer might be in model X’s training data made them believe that model X specifically might be able to solve the question, and they were able to very quickly find enough certainty about the former to commit millions of dollars to the latter.
They don’t need to know, because their IP stealing machine knows for them. They just have to buy enough compute, and someone else’s work is theirs.
(Naturally, I have far too much respect for OpenAI’s legal team to suggest this is what happened in their project.)
So such thing existed. In fact, what they learnt was some progress existed, not what the specific progress was.
No, they asked if they could do a joint publish.
What accident is it when the system is designed to function that way?
Consider this scenario.
Has a google crawler read my new novel, which I may or may not have posted on my blog, page by page, as I wrote it?
Can you, without knowledge of what I have actually done, claim that the google crawler has not seen the novel?
Without any evidence that I have posted the novel online, it might be tempting to say that the crawler has not seen the novel, but what if I were in an adversarial position against Google on this topic and were challenging them to make that claim. You would wonder if I were hoping Google to overreach by making a definitive claim without taking into account some action that they had no knowledge of. It becomes difficult to use the scientific expression "There is no evidence for this" when there is an accusation of malfeasance because it can be so easily be conflated as "You can't prove we did it". It seems like the best you could say would be 'Unlikely, but possible'
what? really?
> Such intensive use of AI doesn't come cheap. In a post on X, LisanBench, an LLM benchmark evaluator, estimated that the output tokens alone would cost about $6.5 million at OpenAI's average consumer price. Including the far larger volume of input tokens, the post estimated the total could reach $10 million to $40 million.
https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-math-problem-solved-t...