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Comment by rakejake | Hacker News Reader

OAI started working on this only after they found out it was close to being solved. They threw a team of researchers who spent sleepless nights + a ton of compute. This is not exactly healthy academic competition - it's like if you spend a year hunting for oil fields and finally find a very promising area to be explored, only to find that Exxon tapped their entire exploration unit to go all in and and find it overnight just to stake claim to the discovery. Tao said it right - math should not be treated as a non-renewable resource to be mined.

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that is not related to the accusation that they literally stole Buckmaster's work, which seems baseless

I don't agree with the oil claim analogy. this is knowledge, freely given to the world. not something hoarded by a corporation

but a very large part of the whole model was trained on work in a manner the authors didn't consent to, the "for research purposes only" datasets of the entire Internet, etc

and you can argue this is "fair use" or whatever, not the point now, the point is that it definitely makes those accusations no longer "baseless".

in addition, it is not given freely to the world, it is the knowledge of the Internet/WWW being sold back to you as a subscription service. it's not free. and it's not even "given", because they can (technically) turn off the tap at any moment and you don't have it any more.

Humans do this all the time. You watch a YouTube video and subconsciously choose the same colour palette. They hear a rumour that it's a solved problem, i.e. they were pointed in the right direction that is all.

I mean some companies glean insight into new products merely by asking other people what they do for a living.

People need to get over this ownership thing, it's being taken too far. Humans benefit from the efforts of others simple as that.

> this is knowledge, freely given to the world

Even if you’re starting from a position that credit for a discovery literally can’t be stolen, that still doesn’t resolve in OpenAI’s favor here.

it seems like OAI tried to share, but didn't want to share with an Ant employee. a bit childish, but understandable to want to avoid a headline "Anthropic researcher solves Millennium problem"

it seems like Buckmaster got one-upped and is upset. understandable, but I find their reaction childish as well

> OAI tried to share, but didn't want to share with an Ant employee

Why does OpenAI get to dictate who Buckmaster can claim co-authorship with?

> I find their reaction childish

OpenAI may have, with full plausible deniability, taken Buckmaster’s work and passed it off—in substantial part—as their own. (Fitting into a fact pattern of them having tried to do the same with Apple.)

There is a material takeaway for anyone who does creative or otherwise unique work from this. (Which is unfortunate. Whatever happened here, AI clearly accelerated the discovery process.) For anyone else, I agree it’s just drama.

OAI didn't try to claim Buckmaster's work as their own. OAI tried to let Buckmaster present OAI's work. it is nearly the opposite of your accusation

More like OAI needed someone like Buckmaster's stamp of approval. They know they can't get Tao's. Now they won't be able to get Zoroa's. You have to hope the rest of the guys they didn't know to cite will readily give up honour and dignity

https://www.reddit.com/r/mathematics/comments/1wauync/commen...

It doesn't seem like there's anyone at OAI who knows much about the problem they are solving. Seems like CS theorists or algebraists* trying to own the pros by driving a car that's beyond their skill level. For one, they didn't cite the guys that B&A based their work on.

*It would be most fair to say there are no analysts on board, nor are they likely hire any soon; those are the least impressionable people in math. Applied math PDE elves who hadn't already left on the world-model boats would have jumped off around the time that eg Ilya did because they wouldnt have been able to stand the three Bs pretending to be experts in fields they imagine to be "adjacent".. like Public Relations

> OAI didn't try to claim Buckmaster's work as their own

We can't say this until we have more information on what the OpenAI researchers prompted their model with and to what degree Buckmaster's work was fed into its training data, either by Buckmaster himself or by his co-author.

Pretty strange if they didnt steal Buckmaster's work, right

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