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Comment by ummonk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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 this was unpublished work!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.

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.

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.

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