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Comment by tyre | Hacker News Reader

People talk. If you have a breakthrough solving one of the most famous problems outstanding, you're going to tell people.

You'll say, "Don't tell anyone", which they will ignore because they get a rush and perceived status by sharing it. So then they tell someone, along with "Don't tell anyone", etc.

It's a small enough world (both in academic math, one at Anthropic) that you get to OAI in very few hops.

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The reality is also that most of your colleagues have no interest in stealing your work: they have their own work to do anyway, and having a colleague effervescing about whatever they are working on is kind of the norm in pure research. Just because they are making progress it doesn't mean they are about to do anything interesting.

Also it's not like you're looking for a lost pair of car keys: just getting to the level where you can understand a problem well enough to "steal" it takes a huge amount of work. People are going to know if you're at the level where you could be a competitor.

So in general it's pretty safe to talk generally about whatever you're doing.

"The route to the Clay problem through a smooth force, options c and d in Fefferman’s statement of the problem, is the route Luis and Diego opened and the one Levent and I had quietly chosen to attack. Almost nobody else I know of was working on it. It is not the direction one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement. When I heard “forced,” it was a bright red flag."

We know that OpenAI trained on their prompts, plagiarism is incredibly likely. The only thing we don't know is whether or not it was deliberate plagiarism yet

And deliberate or not it is still plagiarism by the sound of it.

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