pred_

Given how much PII is fed through these systems, would it being opt-out by default not be violating the GDPR by a failure to require explicit consent (or otherwise provide the legal basis for processing)? If a court decides as much, I imagine it would mean that all data harvested this way must be extracted from the models, and all instances where it would have been shared would have to be identified, which would really be something.

The authors had supposedly worked on it for a year, though.

And why aim straight for scooping other researchers upon hearing rumours about their success? Normal, ethically acting, researchers would never do that.

And how about existence of non-sofic groups, which is actually the topic here?

Those statements were about NS, though; I don't think they've made similar statements for the non-sofic groups?

He also just published this one: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/07/finite-time-blowup...

While his concerns expressed here aren't new, it looks like the recent cases of scientific misconduct were enough to push for urgency:

> But in the immediate term, the most pressing issue is for the entire mathematical community to unite around our core values and objectives, and reject irresponsible and unsustainable usages of AI technology that only serve to advance nominal goals rather than the true underlying goals of the field.

Ah, this dupes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49638353

See https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/ for the announcement this refers to.

That's the other thing. Even if it somehow magically turns out that they didn't plagiarize Buckmaster and Alpöge, that an independent audit goes through all their processes and finds that they could not possibly have stolen anything, and ignoring their outrageous attempts to force a coauthor off the author list, and ignoring that their employees act like small children on social media, this is a company whose culture is “we heard of a breakthrough being possible, let's scoop it”.

Normally, when you tell a coworker that you're wrapping up a result, unless they're some kind of sociopath, their natural inclination would not be to try to steal it from you.

> we did not read any private chats

Your post says “While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models .” We can discuss what it means to “read” things but obviously the issue here isn't whether you did it manually or automatically.

But more importantly, what on earth are you doing threatening real scientists to remove their coauthors, then making fun of them on social media? Does the entire company run on that toxic culture, or did those people run off of some kind of outrageous tangent?

> A major goal of our work is to empower scientists to advance research and technology that benefits all of humanity.

And what's a better way of empowering people than robbing them.

Yeah but they at least they got to steal $1 million from that nasty math prof who didn't want to remove his co-author.

What did he do?

Douglas was first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49608972

Assuming that your mind is not already made up, and that facts aren't getting in the way, do see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49608972

Douglas' 6:59 AM UTC post is edited. He has a 6:22 AM UTC post that predates Brown's 6:47 AM UTC post: https://xcancel.com/_sholtodouglas/status/209720900556759874...

Also note the lower post ID in the URL.

In an earlier HN thread, there was speculation that Anthropic was being dishonest about the amount of human input required in some of their results; that was dismissed as conspiracy and flagged.

It seems clear now that mathematical results can be traded on some kind of obscure market made by the frontier AI labs.

I suppose it could go the other way too: “Dear Bubeck, how much will you pay me to not write that I did this with GLM-5.3?”

Or, given how dedicated he appears to be to the company, a promotion and a raise.

I guess we won't know if that's what was used (and maybe even provided as part of the prompt given that both Alpöge and Mathew are mathematicians) since they decided against sharing their Fable conversation and instead opted for a memey tweet as their avenue of publication. We really ought to normalize full transparency in how results come about.

Anyway, if I read Tao's post and comment correctly, there's still a gap from the Vitushkin construction to a counterexample, but chances are that was in the training data. In general, it is just a serious problem for their practical applicability that the models are outputting proofs with absolutely terribly reference hygiene.

I don't think it is nonsensical at all. The author and his collaborator both appear to be bright people, so there's a good chance they had to offer non-trivial insights to guide the LLM, yet it's clearly in the interest of his employer to downplay whatever personal contribution they provided.

Edit: Now the OP is flagged/dead for some reason. You could disagree on their take (calling it a marketing stunt is maybe a bit much), but I think the argument is sound, so flagging seems counterproductive to the discussion.

I mean the front page is full of LLM smells, so presumably the games are made that way too.

And that's fair; this whole thing could be one-shot with any of the leading models.

> got flagged for some reason

From a quick look at your profile, the majority of your submissions have been Show HNs. HN only allows some fraction of your submissions to be Show HNs (imagine if the front page was nothing but), so eventually they will just be auto-flagged.

You may find tools like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat... useful then.

> Yes any company generating csam should not be in business as a legitimate entity.

At the same time, in this corner of the world, acting Minister for Justice (also known for trying to push through Chat Control), and NGO Save the Children, have been working to make legal the generation of CSAM for law enforcement use. So that would certainly make the industry legitimate, and you would already have a customer.

https://www.justitsministeriet.dk/pressemeddelelse/regeringe...

And the cookie consent form is one of those that require you to click a gazillion toggles. Hasn't it been established now that opt-out must be no harder than opt-in?

Time for https://itsid.cloud/index2.html to be acquired by one of the big players, I guess.

The time is ripe for deterministic AI; incidentally, this was also released today: https://itsid.cloud/ - presumably will be useful for anyone who wants to quickly recreate an open source Python package or other copyrighted work to change its license.

Based on https://github.blog/changelog/2026-03-25-updates-to-our-priv..., it looks like they are going to go for “legitimate interest” which seems clearly overridden by data subject interests in this case, hence not lawful.

If you don't want to wait until your PII inevitably gets sent through, you can already now file a complaint to your local supervisory authority: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/about-edpb/about-edpb/members_en

Would you be able to comment on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47522876, i.e. explain the legal basis for this change for EU based users? If there is none, you may have to expect that people will exercise their right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.

What is the legal basis of this in the EU? Ignoring the fact they could end up stealing IP, it seems like the collected information could easily contain PII, and consent would have to be

> freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous. In order to obtain freely given consent, it must be given on a voluntary basis.

The endorsement system already works along that line: https://info.arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html

It's probably not perfect but in practice, it seems to have been enough to get rid of the worst crackpotty spam.