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> What sort of guidance do you think is happening in a 10k agent, 320b token, 88 hour run ? AI did this one

If you read the PDF release by Buckmaster, apparently the initial claim from Brubeck was that there as very little human input involved, then as the call progressed more and more people popped up that has been involved with it.

Does this aspect really matter? Not really, other than OpenAI wanting to present this as all the work of their model.

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https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf

I was shown a prompt and told the internal research model had simply been given the problem statement. Levent had been told by Sebastien “very little human input” had been used. This turned out not to be true. Over the course of the call, as members of their team sent Sebastien corrections and details over their internal chat, it emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem, that this was one of a number of things that was tried, that work had started on the unforced problem, that the team first set the model on easier problems, including Euler, that even the prompt that had been shown to me had been written by prompting Codex, and that an insane amount of compute had been used.

I asked when the first prompt had been sent by them. This question was not answered directly by OpenAI for some time. Eventually it was agreed that it had been sent in the past few days, after information about our work had reached OpenAI.

>If you read the PDF release by Buckmaster, apparently the initial claim from Brubeck was that there as very little human input involved, then as the call progressed more and more people popped up that has been involved with it.

As it seems and as they tell it, they started the run modestly and diverted more resources towards it as it looked more and more promising. The run didn't start with 10k agents for instance. The point is there isn't anything humans are doing in this timeframe against all this text that would count more than "little human output". It's still a fair assessment I would say.

>Brubeck's comments were weird at face value

This is an odd way to gloss over threats.

I put it like that because of Brubeck's own words on the matter. You're acting like we've gotten email receipts here. I'm not really interested in going over a he-said she-said about strangers.

Brubeck has admitted what he said, but claims he immediately retracted it as a "poor choice of words".

Given Buckmaster's telling, this seems beyond "poor choice of words"... It was a veiled threat, that he then doubled down on with his "If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice." follow-up.

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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.”

**

FWIW there are also other people on Twitter, such as this DeepMind researcher, saying this is a pattern for Brubeck.

https://x.com/dheeraj_nagaraj/status/2097266146445774924?s=2...

Fair enough then. I had only seen some earlier comments.

Can you specify what leverage you think Brubeck has over an independent professor's career in order to make threats?

I see none, and consequently Brubeck's explanation makes more sense to me. I understand he meant these words, which he supposedly retracted on the spot, in a "why would you ruin your career with this behavior / turning down the opportunity I am offering" way.

You don't think that is the likely explanation?

I'm not sure the value of speculating, but since you insist...

If someone said to you "you're going to regret this, mo-fo!", do you really need to suppose they had a specific plan in mind, rather than just intent to intimidate?

If you want to suppose that Brubeck had a concrete plan for how he would ruin Buskmaster's career, then my best guess would be that he was threatening for OpenAI to publish without giving any credit to Buckmaster (who has been working on Euler overall for at least 10 years). Obviously this would be absurd, but no more absurd than what Brubeck was also demanding - that Levant was excluded for any credit and could not have his name on any OpenAI writeup (with this being the exact sticking point that Buckmaster was refusing to accept).

The funny thing is that this threat, as is often the case, seems to say more about the insecurities of the person making the threat than the person they are directing it to.

Bubeck made no such demands, particularly not for removing Levent from authorship of his own work.

What they discussed was that Bubeck felt it would be inappropriate for an Anthropic employee to author the proposed rewrite of OpenAI's proof.

> Interesting way to frame progress that didn't move along till an LLM generated proof.

This part of your argument is totally wrong. The OpenAI approach begins with the B/L work. The belief / knowledge that their approach would pan out is worth a lot - it means essentially “depth-first” search in this direction will be more fruitful than a general search.

Unless you are counting the B/L work as LLM generated. Is that your argument? Even if you do consider it that way, to me racing in for a scoop isn’t a good look.