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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7374 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.

As information about the OpenAI Hugging Face incident gets weirder and breaks into mainstream media, I began telling people around me that it feels like the beginning of those scifi/apocalyptic movies where there are talking heads on the news that everyone glazes over (cue: Shaun of the Dead). As @ebrso linked, OpenAI is claiming to have a solved a Millennium problem. I'll argue 99% of the people in the world wouldn't understand what this means. Though I suppose that is typical of scientific and academic progress. Though I think the more important thing is to realize how fast all these changes and progress and innovation is coming. Will we all become like the protagonist in Her, where we're occupied by human-scale problems, hugely important to us, but kinda misses the bigger point? (though I guess that's all we are in front of an uncaring universe).

I got a news alert on my laptop after the result was announced. It was for the head of the Smithsonian resigning. There’s nothing on Fox News, nothing on CNN. The media is asleep at the wheel. Normies have no idea the man-made horrors beyond our comprehension that are being built as we speak.

From "SIAI: Donate Today and Tomorrow" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

A benefit that everyone in your species shares equally, benefits all alleles equally, and hence is an evolutionary null-op; it produces zero genetic information. Luckily, human beings are adaptation-executers, not fitness-maximizers. There were no existential risks in the ancestral environment, nor any Friendly AIs, no way for an individual to harm or benefit the entire human species at once. Our psychologies are already inscribed, solely by those selection pressures that acted on our ancestors. The psychology of existential risk is likely to fit the "threat to the tribe" template, a problem that was around in ancestral times and that involved noticeable selection pressures.

(Unfortunately, "threats to the tribe" tended to be those evil Other Guys from the Tribe That Lives Across The Water, not hard-to-understand threats like recursively self-improving optimization processes. Which is why it's so difficult to keep people focused on boring old saving the world instead of fun politics. The sad truth is that if the Singularity were recognizably a Democrat or Republican project, we'd get a lot more funding.)

And from his post on the Deepmind vs. Sedol match:

Only 70,000 people watching this on YouTube? The human species really has tuned out to a surprising extent.

Only 70,000 people watching this on YouTube? The human species really has tuned out to a surprising extent.

Well, the only part of that meaningful to anybody who's not a high-level Go player themselves was the outcome. (People did point this out to EY in the responses to that post.)

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