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.
Tristan Buckmaster’s post cited extensive use of LLMs in the process of his collaboration with Levent:
“We used several LLMs throughout: Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s Codex, especially with GPT-5.6 Sol and, more recently, Astra.
The latter was only used for writeups and auditing our arguments. For most of the past year progress was slow. We worked through the literature and upgraded various preliminary results, up to obtaining finite time blow up for the Incompressible Porous Media equation (with smooth forcing).
This was until about a month ago, when we had real progress: on August 15th, we obtained the blow up results, with smooth forcing, for both Boussinesq and Euler. I can say the first LLM generated proof Levent sent me was the most horrendous I have ever read; we verified it on Lean on August 22nd. Since this point, we have been working around the clock to understand this proof and turn it into something readable.”
The OpenAI research post states they began training GPT-6 internally on August 28th, and that user chats are used to train models.
“We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem. While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models .”
For an incredibly niche topic like this, I believe it’s extremely likely that Buckmaster/Levant’s work would influence the direction of OpenAI’s agents’ work even as a de-identified drop in the overall bucket of training data.
Yep, it's possible. But, we have literally no idea how much a set of prompts would impact training as far as general usefulness. I don't think we even know if Tristan's said he allowed training on his prompting or not. This is about money, ego, primacy, all the usual mathematician priority disputes.
Shenanigans is an inaccurate word; it implies underhanded behavior that's hidden / concealed. I think "to act so aggressively" is more balanced.
Here's my answer: If you think we're getting to AGI in the next 9 months, then you believe, with all your heart, that these problems will fall soon. However, there's an ocean to boil in terms of what you could point your limited clusters at. In the meantime, the market is desperate for any sign your company might be first to AGI. Therefore, news of tractability with current models might focus an organization intensely - internally they have a huge leg up on the public, and therefore it's minimal compute to check - and if they are successful, they get approximately $50 million of free PR, likely adding 10-20% to their valuation.
Likewise someone like Tristan is fighting for his (metaphorical) life right now, hoping to preserve his claims of primacy and have a shot at some of that prize money, despite being only partway to a full solution for N-S.
I don't think we see any behavior at all that isn't simple to understand and well described by the setup here, but tell me what you see differently.
OpenAI most certainly did not as you put it, "to act so aggressively". They have simply indulged in plagiarism/malpractice/fraud all for the sake of pumping up their evaluation in light of their forthcoming IPO and to one-up their arch-rival Anthropic and try to get themselves to AGI certification.
In the process they have shafted real-world hardworking mathematicians, which is to say the least, despicable. Note that stories are now coming out from other mathematicians who have also been shafted in a similar manner. Also there are cases where they have had mathematicians accept their "deal" (like the one they offered Buckmaster that he refused) and have OpenAI name linked to their work.
Regarding "their proof", their claim is only solving Navier-Stokes partially for when a smooth force is applied and not a fully general solution (which is maybe impossible). The proof is still being verified and we don't know whether it is just an approximation/hallucination or not.
Their most blatant lie is that they "gave only the problem statement" to their system which then went ahead and solved it. This is almost an impossibility. Problems like these need to identify a specific lead/approach and some work to be done on that path before you can even know whether that approach is promising and worth pursuing. This problem has resisted all attempts at solution for over two centuries. This is where the Buckmaster/Levent's work's importance comes in. They identified a promising approach based on other mathematicians work and have been using both OpenAI and Anthropic's models to make progress and had reached a promising milestone which they published. But they inadvertently gave away their approach to the model's training data set which OpenAI capitalized on by throwing a large amount of compute at the problem to get to the finish first.
This is straightforward stealing of other people's work and building upon it to claim it as your own which can and should be sued. All Scientists/Mathematicians/Researchers who feel OpenAI has done them dirty should band together and file suit.
This whole thing could easily have been avoided if they had worked with the researchers so everybody's concerns/needs are met.
By engaging in this sort of backstabbing, OpenAI has effectively killed the "Goose that laid the Golden Eggs". viz. Researchers were giving away their hard-earned highly specialized knowledge freely to the models in the hope that it will help them get quicker to the result. But now everybody is going to lockdown their research findings and will stop sharing it with the models to the overall detriment of advancement of Science.
Comments
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.
Tristan Buckmaster’s post cited extensive use of LLMs in the process of his collaboration with Levent:
“We used several LLMs throughout: Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s Codex, especially with GPT-5.6 Sol and, more recently, Astra.
The latter was only used for writeups and auditing our arguments. For most of the past year progress was slow. We worked through the literature and upgraded various preliminary results, up to obtaining finite time blow up for the Incompressible Porous Media equation (with smooth forcing).
This was until about a month ago, when we had real progress: on August 15th, we obtained the blow up results, with smooth forcing, for both Boussinesq and Euler. I can say the first LLM generated proof Levent sent me was the most horrendous I have ever read; we verified it on Lean on August 22nd. Since this point, we have been working around the clock to understand this proof and turn it into something readable.”
The OpenAI research post states they began training GPT-6 internally on August 28th, and that user chats are used to train models.
“We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem. While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models .”
For an incredibly niche topic like this, I believe it’s extremely likely that Buckmaster/Levant’s work would influence the direction of OpenAI’s agents’ work even as a de-identified drop in the overall bucket of training data.
Yep, it's possible. But, we have literally no idea how much a set of prompts would impact training as far as general usefulness. I don't think we even know if Tristan's said he allowed training on his prompting or not. This is about money, ego, primacy, all the usual mathematician priority disputes.
Tristan Buckmaster, the mathematician at the center of it (https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/) put out a public statement that everybody should read (pdf) - https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf
So what might have been the incentive for OpenAI to do all this shenanigans? It might have to do with getting its models certified for AGI and getting out of lockin with Microsoft - https://deadneurons.substack.com/p/the-quiet-unwinding-of-mi...
Shenanigans is an inaccurate word; it implies underhanded behavior that's hidden / concealed. I think "to act so aggressively" is more balanced.
Here's my answer: If you think we're getting to AGI in the next 9 months, then you believe, with all your heart, that these problems will fall soon. However, there's an ocean to boil in terms of what you could point your limited clusters at. In the meantime, the market is desperate for any sign your company might be first to AGI. Therefore, news of tractability with current models might focus an organization intensely - internally they have a huge leg up on the public, and therefore it's minimal compute to check - and if they are successful, they get approximately $50 million of free PR, likely adding 10-20% to their valuation.
Likewise someone like Tristan is fighting for his (metaphorical) life right now, hoping to preserve his claims of primacy and have a shot at some of that prize money, despite being only partway to a full solution for N-S.
I don't think we see any behavior at all that isn't simple to understand and well described by the setup here, but tell me what you see differently.
OpenAI most certainly did not as you put it, "to act so aggressively". They have simply indulged in plagiarism/malpractice/fraud all for the sake of pumping up their evaluation in light of their forthcoming IPO and to one-up their arch-rival Anthropic and try to get themselves to AGI certification.
In the process they have shafted real-world hardworking mathematicians, which is to say the least, despicable. Note that stories are now coming out from other mathematicians who have also been shafted in a similar manner. Also there are cases where they have had mathematicians accept their "deal" (like the one they offered Buckmaster that he refused) and have OpenAI name linked to their work.
Regarding "their proof", their claim is only solving Navier-Stokes partially for when a smooth force is applied and not a fully general solution (which is maybe impossible). The proof is still being verified and we don't know whether it is just an approximation/hallucination or not.
Their most blatant lie is that they "gave only the problem statement" to their system which then went ahead and solved it. This is almost an impossibility. Problems like these need to identify a specific lead/approach and some work to be done on that path before you can even know whether that approach is promising and worth pursuing. This problem has resisted all attempts at solution for over two centuries. This is where the Buckmaster/Levent's work's importance comes in. They identified a promising approach based on other mathematicians work and have been using both OpenAI and Anthropic's models to make progress and had reached a promising milestone which they published. But they inadvertently gave away their approach to the model's training data set which OpenAI capitalized on by throwing a large amount of compute at the problem to get to the finish first.
This is straightforward stealing of other people's work and building upon it to claim it as your own which can and should be sued. All Scientists/Mathematicians/Researchers who feel OpenAI has done them dirty should band together and file suit.
This whole thing could easily have been avoided if they had worked with the researchers so everybody's concerns/needs are met.
By engaging in this sort of backstabbing, OpenAI has effectively killed the "Goose that laid the Golden Eggs". viz. Researchers were giving away their hard-earned highly specialized knowledge freely to the models in the hope that it will help them get quicker to the result. But now everybody is going to lockdown their research findings and will stop sharing it with the models to the overall detriment of advancement of Science.