This conclusion is flawed. It's unclear at this point if OpenAI's model or employees actually looked at or stole the author's data. Having worked at large companies before, I'm leaning towards no, since very few employees have access to that data.

And simply knowing a problem can be solved is half the battle.

From Buckmaster's text:

    The route to the Clay problem through a
    smooth force, options c and d in Fefferman’s statement of the problem, is the
    route Luis and Diego opened and the one Levent and I had quietly chosen to
    attack. Almost nobody else I know of was working on it. It is not the direction
    one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement. When I
    heard “forced,” it was a bright red flag.
This is much more than the knowledge than the problem can be solved, it's also the specific, non-obvious approach to solving it. That's much more damning for OpenAI, if confirmed.

That's a stretch. The Luis and Diego paper was published in 2023 and is included in every frontier model's training dataset. An AI model could independently choose the same path route as Luis and Diego, without access to Buckmaster and Alpöge’s work.

And the article states "an insane amount of compute had been used," which implies OpenAI brute-forced their way to a solution. I.e. they searched for every paper published on Navier-Stokes and exhaustively attempted every approach. Such an approach would lead them to a solution.

There is not enough information at this time to reach a conclusion. The best option is to wait for statements from both sides, then reevaluate.

Please don't say brute forced. It sounds like some form of denial or something. Compute for hard problems drops with models--it just means they threw a huge amount of compute. There's (idk about NS specifically so maybe it's exception) no real way to "brute force" a math proof [ok you can enumerate proofs if you can wait until heat death ]

Sorry for random rant but I don't think these statements help your point

> An AI model could independently choose the same path route as Luis and Diego, without access to Buckmaster and Alpöge’s work.

the post you were replying to quotes Buckmaster specifically denying this: "It is not the direction one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement."

> And the article states "an insane amount of compute had been used," which implies OpenAI brute-forced their way to a solution. I.e. they searched for every paper published on Navier-Stokes and exhaustively attempted every approach. Such an approach would lead them to a solution.

"implies" is a surprising choice of word here. that's certainly one interpretation of "an insane amount of compute had been used". what came to my mind, considering Buckmaster's statement that the AI would not head down this specific path on its own, is, though, that they prompted it in this specific direction and then used an insane amount of compute. this seems consistent as well with these other statements:

> 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 (...)

> "It is not the direction one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement."

Can they back up this statement somehow?

yes, this is ultimately nothing but a claim.

Buckmaster did also mention, for example, that a team of people was employed to solve the problem, which supports this claim. but that is another claim whose veracity could also be questioned. but at some point we must trust other people, unless we can be satisfied with only believing what we personally see.

(also, IMO, the coincidence of both discoveries in time is pretty suspicious. this one doesn't need you to trust many people i guess)

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How is it unclear? The entire point of deploying models across corporate America is to train on your workflows. Eventually replacing you with digital you is why they're doing it!