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.
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.
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?
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.
Did the first offer also come with the outrageous condition that he exclude his co-author from the credit?
Proceeds to ask removal of another coauthor or else we totally discredit you - phrased as why would you do this to yourself.
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.
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.”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.
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.
Either put up some evidence-backed arguments, or shut up.
"If you dont want me to be nice, then I dont have to"
-nice mobster