TechTakes

The /r/singularity and orange site responses have been gross, lots of commenters willing to totally overlook the multiple different ways OpenAI has been utter scum in this debacle in order to celebrate another LLM "success".

there are tons of issues here. almost impossible to convey how bad things are. in no particular order:

1. this research breakthrough was a consequence of dumping tons of money into the ai companies. if the future of the field means being entangled with openai et al. and extreme expenses that is going to upend mathematics in a much bigger way than ability to prove new things will. this hasn't been a focal point of discussion yet but it looks to be at the center of mathematics going forward imo.

2. possibly for legal reasons, the statement stops short of accusing openai of stealing their in progress work. as in literally snaking their documents off the cloud and using them to try to undercut researchers. but it's very clear that that is what the author believes happened

3. openai straight up threatened the mathematician in question. in a colloquial sense they're engaging in extortion. apparently this is so routine for them that they didn't even stop to consider that they can't threaten an academic's career (or they assumed the mathematician would understand there will be no academic careers in the future)

4. openai is straight up lying about their research methods. there are various ways that their announcements have had the potential to be misleading (for example when you see "we spent $2000 to compute these proofs" ask how much they spent on attempts that didn't work). but what they're saying may generally just not be true even in a literal sense

They’re also apparently trying to obscure the amount of human assistance involved

of course lol, gotta keep that agi ruse up

The progression from 'the alleged novel parts were actually already in the training data' to 'we just stole them from some guy's chatbot logs' has been nothing if not organic.

an insane amount of compute had been used.

You don't say.

Glad to see that OpenAI has not changed in their scummy ways. Despite all that has changed in the meantime, they have kept their time-honored tradition of passing off other people's work as their own.

One of OpenAI's math announcements a month ago claimed that their results cost only $2000 worth of tokens, which frustrated me because they were likely sweeping away many inconvenient details and almost certainly misrepresenting their true costs. But people took this as a gotcha. This is the same bullshit as the water usage arguments. We are literally seeing city council members signing motherfucking NDAs about this, and you think that water usage numbers provided by the tech companies themselves are going to sway me?

I am also questioning OpenAI's strategy of strip-mining math for PR, since it seems like advances in math do not actually register that well in the public. From what I remember, the Hugging Face incident got a lot more press than any of the math results.

Deleting this for now as I don’t have time to rewrite it properly, but I’m sure someone else will do a better job of the plagiarism/training on private data stuff that I’ve missed.