I suspect the main reason the community is not receiving it well is largely the same reason many developers are not receiving coding agents well.
Because the training data is millions of hours human efforts being distilled into a cascading hierarchy of enrichment by interested parties without providing attribution or compensation?
I mean, they are certainly trying, but so far there's too much competition so the surplus mostly goes to customers.
If there wasn't a hierarchy of enrichment then rich investors would not be interested in AI at all. It's the only reason there's 22 million lying around to start training on a math problem on a whim; whereas the actual math researchers have to scrape together funding in hope of just maybe one day getting a 1 million dollar prize.
many teachers also taught many students over the course of history, and very few would eventually pay any compensation or even attribute their financial (or career) outcomes to the teachers.
What made model training different?
nuances
This isn’t at all what happened? What are you talking about?
> If I had done this, I also wouldn't have pestered the researchers on a Sunday night to meet immediately so we could negotiate a nice way of presenting the actions I had decided to take.
From what I can tell, both OpenAI and the researchers agree on this meeting happening, except both sides clearly have very different interpretations of what happened and why.
No need to be mysterious. State what reasons you think these are in plain English?
I think all other complaints from all other people in all their myriad variation stem from this core reason. Even if people don't realize it themselves.
Like, if these models had trained on the entirety of human knowledge and art, and then turned out to be absolutely useless, I would bet nobody would waste a second's thought on them.
collaborating with ChatGPT on a novel solution to an unsolved problem, getting 90% of the way there, and then being "scooped" by your AI collaborator (or rather by the company behind it) is a totally different situation. were i in the same situation as these researchers, it would be extremely hard to take OpenAPI's explanation + denial of plagiarism seriously
But that is exactly what I'm implying is the core reason, whether people realize it or not.
I totally agree that the vast majority of software dev is not novel. I have even made several comments to that effect. The same can be said for a lot of creative work as well. Yet many, many devs and creators are very unhappy with AI, and a lot of their complaints are variations on accusations of plagiarism.
And note, I am not saying it is wrong, it is completely understandable, but we need to be clear about where this turmoil is coming from.
If I were in the same situation as these researchers, I would publish all pertinent research work and chats so that the rest of the world can see how close the model's work is to my own. It's been scooped anyway, so there is no reason to keep it private.
I am working on two applications using ChatGPT and Claude. I have no illusions these people won't steal/copy whatever you want to call it, "train their models". Yes, I keep unticking the boxes that allow it, that they so kindly tick for me.
But what happened to these math researchers is something else and I am not sure it's about the money for them. You don't do math research to get rich, but to get acknowledged by your peers. Yes, we live in a capitalist world so obviously you need money to feed yourself. but for some people, that is secondary.
OpenAI stole their thunder, and that's just fucked up. It's not equivalent to cranking out a CRUD app for profit.
As to OpenAI stealing their thunder, from all I can tell that is not what they intended. If we step away from the drama, it's low-key hilarious what happened: OpenAI heard somebody had already solved a much bigger problem -- which in fact they had not -- so they set their latest model to work on it... and it actually solved it!
Now if they had stolen the researchers work this would be a very different matter. This is something I myself have called out as a risk in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48839896 -- so I'm particularly sensitive to this aspect, but as far as I can tell this is not the case here.
That they heard a rumour that a major open problem had been solved, so they decided to try and scoop the other mathematicians while they were writing up their preprint is extremely unsporting.
Then they decided to exclude an author because of his employer, even though he had used their own products to write the proof!
They haven't necessarily breached any formal ethical rules but their behaviour will lead to them and their products being shut out from the mathematical community.
That's it, that's why it isn't being received well.
That's worthless.
I haven't looked into it myself, but if true, that seems incredibly scummy.
What a mess.
Things like the nytimes interview are with Buckmaster, who works at NYU, not Alpöge. I saw a couple of tweets from him over the last week. Any chance of clarifying what makes you think he's "clearly pushing the case"?
Why should I care if a company claims they find no evidence of wrongdoing? Is that the threshold for privacy/trust? “We don’t care if it appears that we’ve been dishonest unless there’s hard proof.” They can simply design proof keeping to terminate at the places their dishonesty is implemented.
For me, when there is a clear motive to be dishonest, a corporation should be assumed to be dishonest unless there are robust transparency measures and a regulatory environment shown to be providing a cost to dishonesty. Without it, all you do is burden yourself while the powerful entity moves ahead with its selective dishonesty and the rewards there reaped.
I haven't seen any evidence of this. Much of the anger is coming from the unaffiliated researcher. levent (the anthropic employee) has mostly constrained his comments to basically "I would have been happy to collaborate w/ folks from OAI"
My understanding is that they asked the independent researcher to improve OpenAI's AI generated proof and be the lead author of the paper to publish OpenAI's result.
This is the paper where they did not want the Anthropic employee collaborating. Not their work.
In terms of work in mathematics, something I personally would not do based on ethical grounds would be to hear a rumor that some researchers are taking a certain approach and may be nearing a solution, use a model that was possibly contaminated with intimate knowledge about that approach (though later they investigated and think it wasn't), and then commit millions to tens of millions of dollars and untold amounts of hardware to try to beat them to it. If I had done this, I also wouldn't have pestered the researchers on a Sunday night to meet immediately so we could negotiate a nice way of presenting the actions I had decided to take.
Even if you don't think it was unethical, it was never going to be received well in the community that was especially going to care about this work, and who are very much peers to many of the people working on this solution, so it was at the least an enormous (and well-deserved) own-goal that their unveiling of their solution to NS went like this.