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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

The irony is that OpenAI got into this trouble only because they tried to play "nice". They told Buckmaster that he could publish the final result as the author as long as he removed Alpöge from the author list. They wanted to give Buckmaster a chance to be the one solved N-S problem.

While this behavior is highly questionable, if OpenAI just published the final result without notifying Buckmaster first and simply cited his previous researches, there would be no ground for anyone to accuse OpenAI for anything. Their self-perceived "generosity" backfired dearly and I'm sure they'll never make the same mistake again. There is probably a policy forbidding any OpenAI employee to contact external researchers like that now.

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No.

1. Buckmaster contacted OpenAI first. Not the other way.

2. Giving the $1M bounty to a human mathematician for the effort and giving him credit would be excellent PR. They had already burned much more than $1M for the generation. Adding him as author also costs nothing. Purely pragmatical.

3. “As long as he removed Alpöge” part itself is against academic honesty by all means.

4. Buckmaster rejected fame and $1M only because doing (3) would be wrong. That’s a perfect example of honesty. That can’t be overstated.

5. After the rejection OpenAI guy (Sebastien) did’t say, “ok bye”. He threatened Buckmaster to “end his career”.

6. At that point OpenAI was not sure if they really used his conversations in their proof. He basically wanted to buy him to control any damage.

7. They omitted Buckmaster’s published work and any other related work in their References section. Also an academic malpractice.

If you see generosity and niceness in all of this you are either too naive or your name is Sebastien.

There are some mixed up things in your post, maybe double check next time, especially before quoting anyone, as you really undermine your point even if you're directionally right.

> Buckmaster rejected fame and $1M only because doing (3) would be wrong

I doubt Buckmaster would have accepted the offer to "write a paper presenting the Navier-Stokes result, acknowledging that an internal OpenAI model had resolved it" even if removing Alpöge from authorship wasn't a requirement. He clearly wanted nothing to do with OpenAI's actions here.

edit: I don't know if people think I'm disagreeing here, I'm certainly not, I'm just pointing out that playing the game of telephone with easily verifiable quotes is lazy and bad. For example, "end [your] career" was "ruin your career", and it was phrased as the much more "it would be a shame if something happened to you" like "Why would you ruin your career?" when Buckmaster said he would go public with this conversation: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf

You’re right. I used quotes when I was really paraphrasing.

Here is the actual paragraph from the statement:

> I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”

Context matters in communication. In that context I understand that dialog more like: we’re powerful and you are not, do the smart thing and play along, if not I don’t have to play nice. He presented a very good “offer that he can’t refuse”. But that’s my interpretation.

First of all I put "generosity" in quotes because I don't believe a corporation as big as OpenAI is even capable of acting out of generosity. It's always one of the three: A) PR B) commoditizing complements C) stupidity.

In this case it's more like C) though, as in hindsight the best move OpenAI could do is insisting that they just used an insurmountable number of tokens to exhaust all the published directions. They absolutely shouldn't have thought of negotiating with Buckmaster over the Clay prize at all, let alone trying to manipulate him into a situation where Alpöge is specifically excluded.

> the best move OpenAI could do is insisting that they just used an insurmountable number of tokens to exhaust all the published directions

So… lie more? They knew the approach and started there.

At least they were honest about that.

Your theory of how companies work is certainly interesting.

It sounds like you think they have solved the principal–agent problem?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

> if OpenAI just published the final result without notifying Buckmaster first and simply cited his previous researched, there would be no ground for anyone to accuse OpenAI for anything

Yes, there would? They would have left off Buckmaster as a precedent whose work they potentially relied on.

If they tried to play nice they would have offered the compute upon hearing the rumors, and not just "authorship" after or close to getting a result. It's just a PR stunt.

The reality would be the same. They probably used prior session history between the research and Astra to train the internal model, and used it to front run-the researcher.

This is the biggest self-own in the history of software. If you can relate to Pixar, OpenAI is Chick Hicks celebrating at the end of the Piston Cup and wondering why he's getting booed.

The lack of self-awareness is something to behold, and says a lot about their corporate values.

> They told Buckmaster that he could publish the final result as the author as long as he removed Alpöge from the author list.

How is that "nice"?

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