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Comment by qnleigh | Hacker News Reader

> It was also said that if OpenAI posted after us, they would say that we deserved the Clay Prize, and that we were the “closest humans to the problem”. I declined both offers. I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”

I'm not even sure what to say to this, but I think this should be widely known if it is indeed what happened.

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IF ANYTHING, OpenAI ought to investigate and officially react to this particular communique since this dude was communicating on their behalf. If there are supporting evidence, I would expect nothing less than a firing and an apology. The issue itself is separate from the whole thing.

Or, given how dedicated he appears to be to the company, a promotion and a raise.

Dark take, but I really hope not. If anything it would be a good opportunity to buy some goodwill by washing themselves from all the alleged shadiness so far.

This is OpenAI though. There were zero visible consequences to them unleashing a swarm of agents on the public internet. We will see how it goes down but my prior is zero consequence and a statement along the lines of "Isn't our AI great? Also we love transparency, ethics and collaboration."

when it comes to openai and shadiness I'm pretty sure it's a "fish rots from the head" situation.

not if the dedication ends up making the company look bad

I think this should be in the title of the post. 'OpenAI allegedly threatening to ruin a prominent researcher's career', or smth like that.

There's some glaring mistakes in your framing.

First, this is an unnamed OpenAI employee speaking, not OpenAI the organization.

Second, you miscomprehended the article. The employee did not "threaten to ruin a prominent researcher's career". The actual quote is "Why would you ruin your career?", which implies the researcher would damage their own career, i.e. via self-sabotage.

Then the actual "threat" is "If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice” which is an entirely different statement.

I don't even understand the conflict tbh. Probably I'm just dense. Tristan is not claiming NS, just a huge advance which may solve NS soon. OAI is claiming NS and willing to credit Tristan for the ideas and publish after.

Oai offers two options, the second Tristan views as dishonest. But Tristan rejects the first, why? Because he thinks it's theft? But then why would OAI threaten him?

He claims to have found a counterexample for NS (see the second paragraph of the article), but the paper is not ready yet.

OpenAI claims to already have a full proof (which they produced in the past 5 days after the rumors leaked). Hence the dispute.

What I find interesting is the timeline of when he found counterexample for NS is very unclear. Did Tristan find a counterexample weeks ago or was it very recently? Was it after OpenAI solved it? The wording is intentionally vague.

Either way, there was a massive rush to publish these results.

Is that version of NS Tristan stated enough for the clay prize? I thought the main gripe is Tristan claimed that OAI is stealing their approach. Or that they shouldn't try to scoop a result which he expects to complete soon. But I stand to be corrected if you know whether the version he referred to is indeed enough for millennium prize.

Hypo-dissipative NS != NS

Thanks, I wasn't aware of this technicality.

> But Tristan rejects the first, why? Because he thinks it's theft? But then why would OAI threaten him?

Did the first offer also come with the outrageous condition that he exclude his co-author from the credit?

But i don't understand what OAI is offering in the first offer to allow them to believe they can demand that? Not publishing before Tristan? If they really beat Tristan to the publication i would consider it truly morally corrupt conduct so i feel like you can't make an offer like if you give me something i won't be totally corrupt

As an author on the final proof once ready for publication, turning the brewing conflict into "willing" collaborators. Thus solving the potential taint like we are now seeing surrounding their announcement if it became public. But Tristan worked with another collaborator from Anthropic which OpenAI felt would hurt the PR value so wouldn't entertain.

> Second, you miscomprehended the article. The employee did not "threaten to ruin a prominent researcher's career"…

Proceeds to ask removal of another coauthor or else we totally discredit you - phrased as why would you do this to yourself.

Claiming OAI was going to "totally discredit" Buckmaster is baseless.

From the article, it seems OAI wanted to continue discussing the situation with Buckmaster and reach a resolution, but Buckmaster did not want to, declined to respond, and published first.

Also keep in mind we've only heard one side of the story, so any interpretation of events so far is incomplete. There should be a lot more information from OAI's side coming out later today.

From the article, page 3:

  I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”

> Also keep in mind we've only heard one side of the story, so any interpretation of events so far is incomplete.

That’s not quite true though is it. OpenAI is fortunate enough to have one of its employees (you) here to advocate for its side of the story.

Are we reading the same article (page 3)?

OpenAI never asked for the removal of another coauthor. The parent comment is spreading misinformation.

OpenAI offered to let Buckmaster to write their Millennium Prize paper, so long as Alpoge (who works at Anthropic) was not a coauthor on the OpenAI paper. Buckmaster declined this offer.

This is how deniable threats work. The promise of "not being nice" in conjunction with "ruining the career" is as clear a threat as there can be in writing.

they work really well on people who don't think.

Dude you’re over this entire thread unflinchingly supporting OpenAI with nonsense semantics-based arguments.

Either put up some evidence-backed arguments, or shut up.

The employee was named as “Sebastien Bubeck.” It helps to read the article.

But then who is the third person in the call.

"Why would you burn your house down and kill your famiy?"

"If you dont want me to be nice, then I dont have to"

-nice mobster

For context and balance, Bubeck has tweeted a curiously non-specific denial:

> A series of false and inflammatory allegations against me are currently circulating on social channels. To clarify, I came into the discussion following academic norms, and I'm disappointed that it has come to this. Anyone who knows me knows that academic standards are of the highest importance to me. Will have more to say tomorrow.

Attack is the best form of defence

Isn't that a non-denial denial?

My personal friend worked under bubeck as a grad student and told me he’s abusive.

That’s what people on Twitter are saying, too.

https://x.com/dheeraj_nagaraj/status/2097266146445774924?s=6...

This is an insane thing to read. Bubeck had a reputation even before he started with OpenAI. Of course it was him that was involved in this drama.

This is such a sad mess, and it really didn't have to be this way.

What did he do?

What was his reputation before OpenAI?

My best guess is that from the perspective of the OpenAI people, Buckmaster was letting his paranoia about OpenAI training tank his opportunity to receive the Clay Prize (it seems like Buckmaster and Alpoge's result isn't quite the full result required for the Clay Prize, whereas apparently OpenAI does have that full result worked out, using the same approach that Buckmaster and Alpoge had been exploring).

Whether the Codex sessions could have indeed made their way into Astra training data is something I can only speculate on though.

Zero data retention, wink.

No looksies, wink.

No trainsies, wink.

Well, Buckmaster says both his and Alpöge's use of Codex was non-institutional, and OpenAI claims the right to train their models on inputs and outputs of non-enterprise users in their service policies [0]. So I'm not sure they were even promised that.

[0] https://openai.com/policies/how-your-data-is-used-to-improve...

Only for ChatGPT, if the user hasn’t opted out. Would mathematicians be using ChatGPT for this kind of work? Genuinely asking, I know nothing about this!

Yes, mathematicians are. And yes, most of my colleagues did not even know the opt-out was an option.

Question is what does that button do.

I bet a lot of lawyers are salivating at this question too.

If I am reading your question correctly you are asking about chat interface Vs Codex/Claude code? If so, in my experience Codex/Claude code use is widespread for mathematicians who are seriously using these tools.

It isn't relevant whether they were promised that. Indeed I think the assumption must be that they were not promised that, since otherwise the author asking if they were would not make much sense.

If OpenAI did use the conversations from Buckmaster and Alpoge, then not disclosing it, explicitly, is plagiarism. If they planned to use that plagiarism to pressure the authors to publish, that is even more unethical. What the terms of use say does not make it any more or less ethical.

That's absolutely right. Why the downvotes? If OpenAI are using but not acknowledging the work of others that's plagiarism. If they don't know for sure, but aren't performing due dilligence to make sure they aren't, that's also plagiarism.

I can imagine excuses for unknowing plagiarism in this case. What is described in the article seems much more serious: a research program that was only initiated following reports of the author's similar program. In this case no excuses of "I didn't know" can apply, it is not like this revealed some obscure work from the 1980s nobody could reasonably have foreseen. And as far as I can tell this program was only really initiated to apply pressure to the researchers, without their knowledge/consent. It looks very weird.

> Why the downvotes?

I think there was only ever one. Not sure why.

Your comment was greyed out when I saw it earlier, maybe you missed some downvotes?

About the plagiarism issue, I model it as OpenAI being an advisor and their AI a PhD student. If the advisor puts their name on a paper behind that of their PhD and it turns out the PhD copied the text of the paper from somewhere else the advisor is also responsible of plagiarism, not just the student. The least the advisor can do is withdraw their authorship from the paper.

But, yeah, point well made: it could be much worse than that. Like an advisor instructing a student to copy someone else's paper.

I think "greyed out" just means "0 points or less", so if you get 1 downvote without any upvotes it'll be greyed out. For instance your initial reply to me is now greyed out, and I have since observed a few upvotes and downvotes on my original comment (the downvotes apparently from people who aren't willing/able to justify why).

Personally I don't like thinking of LLMs like a PhD student, because most PhD students remember where they learned things from, while LLMs essentially cannot. I think of it a bit more like someone using a search tool carelessly. Although in this case it is apparently more like deliberate misuse than carelessness.

It's not as simple. All our chats are being used by both labs for their future product (unless signed by ZDR). Where should the acknowledgement begin? Who should be acknowledged? The whole world? All the 2B users of AI?

If I know person A is working on problem B.

I am free to work on problem B too. Why should person A be limited to working on it.

Are you free to intercept person A's emails / hack their computer to find their notes on how they're approaching problem B?

Finding Codex session data in the training set that you tie back to these two researchers is like an hour-long task.

You're also free to plagiarise anyone you want. There are no laws against it on most jurisdictions.

Also brain raping* is not illegal in most jurisdictions.

But they're both deeply disturbing.

_________

* https://youtu.be/JlwwVuSUUfc?si=uWl4-LCHAeI7qtb3

OpenAI is willing to credit so plagiarism is not the right framing here.

It's not clear to me that they would have credited the authors if they had not got in touch with OpenAI first.

If you use their consumer subs, you get subsidized tokens in exchange for them having full access to your data. Those are the T&Cs. Have something secretive? Get a commercial sub with zdr.

(And if memory serves, there is also the opt out from training on consumer subscriptions). Its not plagiarism if you make your data available for the purpose of training their LLMs. It is you giving away your IP for some tokens.

"using the same approach that Buckmaster and Alpoge had been exploring" is imo mealy wording: it seems fairly likely that OA heard Buckmaster and Alpoge were close to a breakthrough, and decided to use their unlimited compute to quickly prompt based on their assumptions about B&As work.

Is that necessarily wrong, so long as the original innovators get a citation credit?

Citation of what? this was unpublished work! This computational blitz really just reads as "might makes right" on OpenAi's part... which isn't surprising, but they should probably be honest about what they've done here.

Yes. Quite simply yes. It's unethical. And it's a dick move

Buckmaster is already an established world expert at these sorts of problems. Declining the Clay prize would hardly dent his career.

Can you call paranoia a fear of something which is happening? OpenAI uses user chats for training and they are "open" about it.

He doesn't seem to be after the prize himself. In this statement he credits the approach of another two researchers:

> I believe Luis Mart´ınez-Zoroa deserves a Fields Medal.

> "If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice."

Exhibit nr 8453324 to not trust Sam Altman and OpenAI.

He most definitely had a hand in murder of the 26 year old whistleblower: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lL7WA6i3zVw

Mother's interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kev_-HyuI9Y

the part where they didn't want the Anthropic person credited even though they deserve credit is also particularly scummy. Corporate greed over common decency.

> I'm not even sure what to say to this, but I think this should be widely known if it is indeed what happened.

Call this behavior what it is, technofascism. Another comment compared it to the Godfather. To think this is the 21st century and academics are still horrible human beings.

To come away from this thinking that the academic is the bad actor, given OpenAI’s reputation, is certainly an exercise in creative thinking.

Are you pretending OpenAI employees are "academics"?

Or are you stating that the researcher is a "horrible human being" for refusing to allow AI?

How careful you are. Instead of just saying what a piece of s..t this Shmubeck is, and what kind of even worse people likely pushed Shmubeck to act as he did.

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