Is OpenAI Taking Everyone for Fools? | Hacker News Reader

Is OpenAI Taking Everyone for Fools?

read.misalignedmag.com

75 pointslcubw44 comments

This article is completely mistaken. The original researchers did not solve Navier-Stokes, while OpenAI did.

Ironically, this seems like the type of mistake you'd make if you used AI to do your research.

For my money, the most “AI does my research” mistake I’ve seen in this whole mess is someone saying “the original researchers did not solve Navier-Stokes, while OpenAI did”. It has all the hallmarks of a classic AI blunder - partially eliding the name of the concept while oversimplifying the concept, a dramatic burst of confidence because it got to express its conclusion as a contradiction, etc. You can practically hear the original AI sentence (“One party lands the Navier-Stokes solve — not the original researchers, but OpenAI.”) before a few words were shuffled around to wash off some of the slop.

"Is OpenAI taking everyone for fools?"

Author proceeds to take their audience for fools

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_existenc...

Going off the believable citations in the wiki page here, it seems more complicated than "who solved it", as there's a mathematician, Anthropic, and OpenAI having a priority dispute.

I’m well aware of the dispute, and OpenAI’s conduct has definitely been less than respectable.

But when the central claim of the argument (that OpenAI and the researchers solved the same problem) is completely false, it’s hard to take the article seriously.

OpenAI should put their internal model to solve the rest of Millenium Prize problems too (assuming their difficulty is in the same ballpark). That would be a proof the model did it without using existing work on the problem.

They did do this, but it seems that Navier-Stokes is the only one that was successful (unless, for some strange reason, they have proofs for the other problems but haven’t released them yet).

>They did do this, but it seems that Navier-Stokes is the only one that was successful

How convenient that they could solve the only problem where researchers have done most of the legwork already. What a coincidence. And the timing, perfect.

Though they claim the contrary, it looks that OpenAI would get nowhere if it did not have information about a recent breakthrough.

Comment that will age poorly

Enlighten us?

Because AI will end everybody's lifetimes, I think

LLMs seem to be much better at finding counterexamples than other types of proof. It’s unlikely the other millennium problems will be solved with counter examples

I haven't been keeping up with all the math proofs. Does anyone know if there have been any LLM proofs that are NOT counterexamples?

likely there are some, the question if its "millennial" type problems.

Also, lots of hype around "millennial" grading, it is kinda funny if we solve all "millennial" problems in first 30 yeas of millenia.

Finding counter examples might be easier, but AI's also useful for assisting in creating proofs. For example, Anthropic just published a formalization of Fermat's last theorem a few days ago, something that human researchers have been working on for decades.

why not just solve world hunger while we're blowing smoke.,

That's solved, but the solution is not applied yet

that's like telling people you've solve long extant math equations.

Applicationis the hard part.

>assuming their difficulty is in the same ballpark

It is not. Many mathematicians have said that they don't expect to see solutions to the other 5 problems in their lifetimes.

Of course, AI might advance fast enough that the "in their lifetimes" part ends up wrong, but there is a considerable gap to the other problems. We have barely any idea of how to even get started on most of them.

OpenAI claims to have solved a decades old mathematical problem just as researchers are about to publish about their solution. Coincidence?

AI derangement syndrome is amazing.

The researchers were also using AI so we're really just arguing over how much AI is allowed. But somehow a lean-verified proof that came first doesn't count because reasons.

If you have been involved in academia in any way, you know this happens all the time because the field is nearing a breakthrough, not a single person.

No, we're arguing over whether or not openai stole the other researcher's work. The evidence is pretty damning.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/08/openai-fought-dirty-on-car...

Actually the evidence is not damning at all.

The evidence is a combination of two things: Tristan insinuating they did (note, not claiming but suggesting or implying), and their own statement saying "While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models ."

The latter is being used by everyone as a sign of guilt, but it's clear that they are making a legally-safe statement since promising a forensic level guarantee that nothing Tristan has every typed into ChatGPT has ever made its way into any training data is a massive claim.

It's also a ridiculous expectation since tons of researchers use ChatGPT or Codex and many have "Use this data to improve" setting on.

>The evidence is a combination of two things

And a third thing: OpenAI's thuggish behavior. Threatening a researcher with reputational ruin and demanding one of their competitors be denied proper credit is unacceptable, and we know OpenAI did both (unless Buckmaster is simply lying. which I find unlikely).

>many have "Use this data to improve" setting on.

Quite irrelevant. We are talking about scientific misconduct, not IP law. It would be misconduct for OpenAI to publish without proper reference to prior art even if that prior art had been explicitly committed to the public domain 1,000 years ago.

> And a third thing: OpenAI's thuggish behavior. Threatening a researcher with reputational ruin and demanding one of their competitors be denied proper credit is unacceptable, and we know OpenAI did both (unless Buckmaster is simply lying. which I find unlikely).

yeah, its not "we know" but "Buckmaster said this".

People lie often, not sure why we would presume unconditional innocence of one side in this case.

https://xcancel.com/sebastienbubeck/status/20973794116915163...

>It is in that context that I said “it would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee” because I felt it would be inappropriate for an Anthropic employee to author OpenAI’s work.

>I was confused why one would turn an incredible source for celebration (of their achievements!) into such bickering, which is when I said that I did not understand why one would risk their career [over unfounded accusations].

Maybe Buckmaster exaggerated the threatening tone and maybe Levent doesn't actually deserve authorship. But he wasn't lying.

> But he wasn't lying.

and we know this how?

Without seeing the full correspondence it’s hard to evaluate for sure, but parent linked to a tweet from the OpenAI employee at the center of the controversy, that’s a primary source you can read and evaluate yourself

Personally I don’t find the tweet a satisfactory explanation of their behavior, it seems like a lot of deflection without directly responding to the specific claims of front-running, and the screen cap of the correspondence doesn’t include all the relevant context. If there was really no bad behavior, why not post the whole thing?

> If there was really no bad behavior, why not post the whole thing?

what is whole thing?..

The screen cap of their full correspondence in the Twitter thread, which was the subject of the preceding sentence. The Twitter post has an obviously incomplete fragment of the conversation that doesn’t resolve what the author presents it as resolving, which is the dispute over how the discussion of authorship of Alpöge actually went down

I read Tristan's allegation from https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf, and he didn't make it clear if threats to him were made over email, texts, calls or during personal meetings, so it is not clear if the whole thing was in writing.

He mentioned that they had meetings:

I asked to speak the following week. On Friday, September 4th, I was asked whether I could meet that day; I again said the following week. At 12:45 on Sunday, September 6th, I was asked whether I could meet “at any point today.” Sebastien Bubeck joined. The three of us spoke twice that afternoon. Levent was not on the calls.

Come on this is all just pure copium from people who swallowed this hook line and sinker.

The worst thing anyone mustered about this is it was a breach of the cordial way mathematicians treat each other.

OpenAI solved Navier Stokes and that’s all anyone will remember about this no matter how mad people are about it and no matter how much they’re coping that they “stole” it.

Newsflash: team Anthropic was using AI too full of people’s “stolen” content.

As alleged by the team with the Anthropic employee.

>and their own statement saying "While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models ."

Legally safe? Forensic level guarantee? Since when do they make those kinds of statements? Talk about moving the goalposts. Those are clear weasel-words from OpenAI, I'm shocked by the people who don't realize this.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

It’s just a coincidence the other team had an Anthropoc employee on it, I’m sure.

It's just a desperate attempt to prove how grandiose their new model is

If they want to desperately solve the remaining Millennium Prize problems, I won't object.

Yeah how desperate to literally solve a Millenium problem? They sure look stupid now. You’ve caught them!

They do look pretty stupid right now, actually.

This but unironically

Their claim is that they put it to the task after hearing about rumors that Anthropic had gotten there. So not a coincidence in any telling of the tale.

Discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613262

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605915

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