Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Apparently forcing is allowed in the Millenium Prize problem statement. So OpenAI's claimed proof could win the prize. OTOH the results Tristan and Levent are publishing here do not go far enough to win the prize, though apparently they are suggestive of a general approach that could produce a solution, which seems likely to be the general approach OpenAI's proof uses.

The question is whether OpenAI's pursuit of this direction happened spontaneously, or as a result of them learning about Tristan's work somehow. To be clear, while the tone of this post seems quite accusatory, Tristan does not claim to know for sure whether OpenAI unfairly benefited from his work. Sholto Douglas from Anthropic is also on record saying the suggestion that OpenAI used Tristan's codex transcripts somehow is extremely unlikely to be true[1], which I agree with, though it doesn't rule out them learning of Tristan's work some other way. I am sure OpenAI will have a statement out tomorrow clarifying their position.

[1] https://x.com/_sholtodouglas/status/2097218240397410733

Why do you find it to be extremely unlikely?

Because very few people actually have access to these logs, all access is monitored and recorded, and improper access will get you fired. It's not worth risking your job over something like this.

Not that I have strong reasons to think this is not true, but what reasons do we have to think it is? Has this been audited before?

There is almost zero risk to your job (quite the opposite, you might be richly rewarded!) if you're simply doing something here which the company wants done. (remember, billions and billions of dollars are at stake here! Do you really think there is no chance at all they would do it??)

> Because very few people actually have access to these logs, all access is monitored and recorded, and improper access will get you fired. It's not worth risking your job over something like this.

That's beyond naive. The money this would mean for OpenAI (and the money they've already spent)...

Okay suppose that you have a trillion dollar competitor salivating at the mouth to ruin your business, which is based on user privacy.

Why would you risk the trillions of dollars worth of business for the niche result of Navier-Stokes, which your average person cannot differentiate from a JEMS paper?

Because your competitor is likely doing the same thing, so they wont even try to call you out. Oh oh or because you're planning the largest IPO in history. The opinions of average people on the paper aren't going to be the ones reflected in the markets...

If there's one thing I'm absolutely confident in, it's that Sam Altman personally goes to great lengths ensuring that ethical standards are upheld at his company.

As modeless said, Sholto Douglas works for Anthropic!

So to be fair, if Anthropic is *also* doing this (quite likely!) then Sholto would have a very strong incentive to try and spin it as highly unlikely that any of the big AI labs are possibly doing this.

Winning a millennium prize is not worth the fallout of "we will steal your IP"

They train on chat logs unless opted out. This really isn't a conspiratorial claim requiring humans to decide to steal IP if true.

His prior work predating OpenAI's interest in the problem was ingested over the last year as he made progress and used for training.

Then, with a prompting nudge from OpenAI's team who acknowledged hearing about the direction "Anthropic" (his co-collaborator) had been pursuing, they're able to point their giant amount of compute towards a known promising path to a proof and crossing the finish line first.

That's fair, but the proofs are different and there was no active perusing of Tristan's approach.

This is literally the business model of LLM companies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com