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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7376 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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No posts about the AI plagiarism in mathematics?

Well, here you go

Tristan Buckmaster published a letter about some stuff in math, blah blah who cares.

The important thing is that he's essentially accusing OpenAI of spying on him and stealing his work in order to publish first. When questioned about this, OpenAI started backtracking and trying to get Buckmaster's coauthor, an Anthropic employee, removed as an author. Then, they threatened him

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. I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer. Two proposals were offered to me. The first was that we post our Euler result, and that OpenAI post its Navier-Stokes result the next day. The second was that, after posting Euler, I alone write a paper presenting the Navier-Stokes result, acknowledging that an internal OpenAI model had resolved it. Sebastien twice asserted that he wanted Levent removed from authorship, and said it would all be simple if only it were not the case that, and it was so annoying that, Levent works at Anthropic. It was also said that if OpenAI posted after us, they would say that we deserved the Clay Prize, and that we were the “closest humans to the problem”. I declined both offers.

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.”

I'm reminded of the fun song, Lobachevsky.

And when his work is done
Ha-ha! - begins the fun
From Dnepropetrovsk to Petropavlovsk
By way of Iliysk and Novorossiysk
To Alexandrovsk to Akmolinsk
To Tomsk to Omsk to Pinsk to Minsk
To me the news will run
Yes, to me the news will run!
And then I write
By morning, night
And afternoon
And pretty soon
My name in Dnepropetrovsk is cursed
When he finds out I publish first!

He is, of course, NOT accusing OpenAI of this. I am accusing Tristan of accusing OpenAI, Tristan is much more circumspect. But c'mon, if it stinks like shit maybe check your shoe. This looks like OpenAI stepped in something.

Sebastien Bubeck, responding for OpenAI, and himself, in non-specific terms.

More here with more background on the timeline and people involved.

Sad to see humans are the same, no matter their calling. Status obsessed, putting themselves in front of their principal which is their field. Second time now humans have attempted to frontrun AI. First one was some woman who claimed to have reduced the minimal known infinitely occuring prime gap to 246, only for OpenAI in a footnote to the Astra announcement at most a couple of days later to reduce it independently to 186. (Between these two reductions Axiom, an AI lab reduced it to 212.)

Now we have someone who was offered a pity credit on something achieved indepedently of him, on the condition his friend who also did not contribute to the result, not be credited, publishing a partial result, while admiting he thinks a full resolution (at least according to Clay Institute criteria) will be published soon.

I wanted to post about this once OpenAI makes the announcement, as I feel right now we only have partial information, and this is not exactly US starts war with Iran level urgent news, that would morally require opinions the very second event happened.

Edit: Guess the rumours about Anthropic solving a Millenium problem that circulated a couple of days ago, were not unfounded.

Edit2: OpenAI announcement.

"...independently..?" Are you shitting me? He showed proof positive they stole his work, and you're trying to frame him as the scammer?

Just utterly embarassing. AI fanbois are a cult, this thread is proof.

He showed proof positive they stole his work

Can you link this or provide any evidence? His own statement specifically states that he has no knowledge if OpenAI stole his work.

I would like to be clear about what I am not claiming. I have not seen OpenAI’s proof. I do not know what their model did, or how. I do not know whether our data was used. I am not accusing anyone of anything. I am stating what I was told, when, and what was proposed to me. I am stating it because the alternative is to let a sequence of announcements say something I know to be false.

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.

Only that the options C and D and the "forced" strongly concerned him.

Status obsessed, putting themselves in front of their principal which is their field.

You're talking about the schmuck threatening another man's career out of nowhere, right? The same guy demanding his rival be denied authorship?

Edit: Guess the rumours about Anthropic solving a Millenium problem that circulated a couple of days ago, were not unfounded.

OpenAI (not Anthropic) has announced a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the 7 Millennium problems.

https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

Relevant paragraph:

”We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem. While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models⁠. However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs unforced).”

Other relevant paragraph:

On Tuesday, September 1, we heard rumors that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved. Inspired by these rumors and by the step change in performance of our internal model, we launched an effort to evaluate it on all open Millennium Prize problems and a few other high-impact problems.

They started prompting after hearing the rumors, does anyone not think the external mathematician's prompts didn't contrinute to their internal model?

Edit: Even more strange, as of Aug 28, an Open AI guy tweeted that Open AI had already tried mellinnium prize problems with limted tests unsuccessfully. Another breadcrumb suggesting the internal model that they developed included the draft paper in the training data.

I have no idea what OpenAI’s internal data pipelines look like, but I think it’s best to assume that anything you type into the chatbox can and will be used against you by Sam Altman/the government/The Basilisk.

but I think it’s best to assume that anything you type into the chatbox can and will be used by Sam Altman/the government/The Basilisk.

ftfy. There's no reason that them using it would be against you.

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