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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25566 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.

I hope OpenAI steps in many more things if it means pushing forward research and rattling the cages of those who want to resource-guard scientific discovery.

What will happen is the opposite: researchers will not mention anything about their ideas for fear of OpenAI or other labs stealing it out from under them. So less will be shared, and less collaboration, because of exactly this.

Closed-minded people may indeed choose to become increasingly closed-off.

It is their own choice to live in isolated misery.

It's good to weed them out.

You can't just round off everyone who wants to get credit for their work to closed-minded. There's a reason why we have patents, and it's to prevent what OpenAI is doing, and promote sharing information instead of hoarding it by allowing the "closed-minded" to control and benefit from the fruits of their labor.

Good people want rewards for good work. Calling them names doesn't get around that.

You can't just round off everyone who wants to get credit for their work to closed-minded.

Calling them names doesn't get around that.

You are projecting.

"Closed-minded" is simply descriptive.

Patents and other IP law are state-enforced artificial scarcity on a medium that is inherently abundant and infinite (ideas and digital media). This is state-enforced closed-mindedness.

It may be useful in some limited carrot-dangling sense, but thank goodness that US law is not Universal Law

"Good people want rewards for good work. "

These "rewards" often come with the implied threat of state-violence if someone """steals""" their idea.

Taking glory-seeking and monopolistic tendencies out of the equation of innovation is a rare moment for cultural renewal. Maybe innovators in the US will finally have to focus on actually building things like China rather than becoming rent-seekers.

China is opening a port in Peru and releasing actually open ai models that the world uses while Americans get steamy at OpenAI for being too innovative.

Perhaps it is the karma that Openai bears for not being open enough.

Anthropic had their own internal leak moment that gave everyone a good idea of how their internal agentic-harness works. Perhaps some event will open OpenAI in a similar way.

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