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Comment by elevatedastalt | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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