Can you speak to why in both cases, the problems OpenAI's models solved used the same techniques the mathematicians were exploring, which also happened to be niche approaches to the problem. As an NLP researcher myself, I find that coincidence highly suspect unless the models focused most of their attempts on the predominant approaches (they are trained for MLE after all).
I'm not a mathematician and I don't want to speculate about anything I can't back up. All I know about Navier-Stokes is from my graduate fluid dynamics class at Stanford a decade ago (where I received a poor grade). However, I don't want to leave you hanging, so what I will say is:
- I've heard some people say the model's solution is quite different from theirs (but I have no clue how to personally assess the spiritual truth of this, so please give it zero weight)
- Thousands of agents costing millions of dollars searched for ideas, and they were encouraged to explore a diversity of approaches, so it wouldn't be too surprising to me if the approaches they tried overlapped with other mathematicians', especially considering the models have knowledge of so much published math research
- This model has been beastly at solving all sorts of math problems (if it was Euler in particular, I'd agree that would look suspicious/lucky)
- The Euler regularity disproof itself took ~100 agents working for ~50 hours (if it was very quick, and then the subsequent NS work took a long time, I'd agree that would look suspicious/lucky)
I understand the skepticism, but from what I know internally at OpenAI, we have zero reason to believe our models did anything fishy. It's hard for us to prove a negative, especially when you have to take us at our word, so I understand why people still feel suspicious.
Edit: Reminds me a bit of the Scarlet Johansson voice cloning accusations and FrontierMath cheating accusations, where the rumors of misbehavior seemed to travel faster than the truth. In both of those cases, we hadn't done what was accused, but suspicions persisted nonetheless.
It's just conflict of interest. OpenAI is trying to get billions and billions and there's so much at stake. You spend millions trying to preempt two guys. It just makes you seem like a big bully. People would get angry even if it was esports or football.
Hearing "rumors" and just trying to overtake them and then asking to collaborate instead of starting out offering the resources beforehand. Just sounds like strong arming. Just doesn't sit right with me.
What was the "truth" in the Johansson case? Many, many people who heard the voice immediately thought it was Johansson's voice, or some kind of sound-alike, presumably picked because she voiced the computer in a popular film. From NPR:
> Johansson said that nine months ago [i.e. mid 2023] Altman approached her proposing that she allow her voice to be licensed for the new ChatGPT voice assistant. He thought it would be "comforting to people" who are uneasy with AI technology.
> "After much consideration and for personal reasons, I declined the offer," Johansson wrote.
> Just two days before the new ChatGPT was unveiled, Altman again reached out to Johansson's team, urging the actress to reconsider, she said.
> But before she and Altman could connect, the company publicly announced its new, splashy product, complete with a voice that she says appears to have copied her likeness.
> To Johansson, it was a personal affront.
> "I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference," she said.
It was an unfortunate misunderstanding / coincidence, as I understand it. The Sky voice actor was a real person using her own voice (not doing an impression), and she was selected via a normal process with a number of other voice actors. This happened before Sam reached out to Johansson. I totally get how Johansson would be weirded out to hear a voice similar to hers after Sam reached out and she said no, but it was purely a coincidence.
We published more details here: https://openai.com/index/how-the-voices-for-chatgpt-were-cho...
Why would outsiders take this at face value considering Altman's reputation as a pathological liar?
Cf. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...
> The memos, which we reviewed, have not previously been disclosed in full. They allege that Altman misrepresented facts to executives and board members, and deceived them about internal safety protocols. One of the memos, about Altman, begins with a list headed “Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of . . .” The first item is “Lying.”
> Graham told Y.C. colleagues that, prior to his removal, “Sam had been lying to us all the time.”
> “He’s unconstrained by truth,” the board member told us. “He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”
> Not long before his death, [Aaron] Swartz expressed concerns about Altman to several friends. “You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted,” he told one. “He is a sociopath. He would do anything.”
> “He has misrepresented, distorted, renegotiated, reneged on agreements,” one [Microsoft senior executive] said.
Many people who worked on voice mode and who worked on the Frontier Math eval have since left OpenAI and now work at competitors of OpenAI (e.g., Anthropic, Meta, Thinking Machines). They'd have every incentive to whistleblow if OpenAI had lied about them. And yet... not one of them ever has.
Edit: I think I'll stop engaging here. I'm happy to share insight into OpenAI and address misperceptions if it's interesting to people, but I'm not really sure how to respond to accusations that we lie about everything. Nothing I can say can satisfy those accusations, as my posts could also be part of the conspiracies. Cheers.
So the credibility of your friends weighs more than the credibility of tenured professors at world-class academic institutions, got it.
I think the reason people are suspicious is that OAI has shown itself to act a bit irresponsibly, especially recently. As two examples, of course it was artifactory, why wasn't that watched more closely, especially after the first instance; editing /etc/hosts is rather embarrassing, that's the front door
As for training, we all know that filtering is incredibly difficult unless there's direct logs. It's also easy for mistakes to happen. Is it really not possible that some employee just accidentally primed the model? Is it possible that the model saw internal communications? I mean OAI has famously shown that they aren't good at monitoring their agents and that their agents love to break out of their sandboxes.
So there's no reason for the public to trust OAI right now. But they have every reason to distrust them.
I think it'd be more good faith if you referred more to the actions of people in the organization (e.g. who allotted or drove "millions of dollars" in agent usage?) than "the model" in describing what happens.
> I've heard some people say the model's solution is quite different from theirs (but I have no clue how to personally assess the spiritual truth of this, so please give it zero weight)
Why would you include a statement that you want us to give zero weight to, unless you don’t actually want us to give it zero weight?
> we have zero reason to believe our models did anything fishy.
Obviously. They cannot do anything "fishy". They are just computer programs.
Now, how about their operators?
OK bro.
I think for OpenAI to win back some hearts and minds here we should have the option to retrospectively turn off "Help improve our AI models". i.e. Any new model trained would exclude all those user's sessions. This could be technically hard but I'm sure an intelligent AI model could work out how to do it :-)
ChatGPT agrees with this too.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa31959-b0e8-83ec-bee6-851ed18d45...