This is actually bigger than that. This is an "AI is eating the world" situation.

The math community was one of the first to be affected because RLVR makes Math an easier target for AI. We witness AI eating the math community.

Software community was also affected due to similar and other reasons. All other professional communities will face a similar challenge in the near future.

> Why is it OK if openAI does it?

OpenAI has a lot of money, a lot of rich investors who want it to go to the moon, and an extensive propaganda operation.

If I were a business, I wouldn't want my proprietary business information into a hands of a competitor. But CEOs are racing to do it, and (at best) relying in flimsy contractual guarantees they have no means to verify.

Multiple OpenAI staff have publicly said they cannot do that as accessing specific user settings without their consent (or legal requirement) violates their internal privacy policy.

However, the mathematicians could easily declare whether they had the toggle on or off. Yet curiously, they will not say!

Yes you're missing several obvious things. Even saving the last changed date (nevermind every change date or what the change was) for every setting for every user would be earth crushingly wasteful. The value by itself isn't even worth including in backups.

Same way for me.

Imagine what a genuinely openness-focused organization of this sort could be. Even if we imagined a commercial half, we could imagine a foundation with mass-membership, perhaps with a membership fee equal to 1/2 the typical personal subscription and functioning to set the direction, elect the board, etc., and then a commercial half which might be rough, tricky, deceptive, making deals with anybody.

I think I'd have been fine with the commercial half being a bit of a monster, as long as I'm part of the members and we decide what sort of board it gets and there's a clear "this is basically controlled by the public" and if I were part of a club of this sort, I would, like you absolutely fill up a directory with texts and computer programs and careful annotations to aid training.

and they could have had it. It could have been easy to make an organization like this. I think you still can. An international AI club, the members vote on what sort of training material may be supplied and for what intents, create some committees to review quality, and then everyone starts making their little games and RL environments and annotated stories and programs that ordinary LLMs misunderstand, and then they get together and fine-tune something, and if that works well they then get some staff and better training infrastructure and end up with a commercial half.

It might be a lost cause regardless, because this is under the assumption that we can trust OpenAI to be honest about their own investigation, which is unlikely.

Only under gross negligence would it be unprovable: Did you use a model whose training set included user data? Did the transcripts of any of the agents include a tool call whose result including user data?

It's the 'conversations' of some mathematicians with OpenAI. So the question is: did anyone feed the conversation(s) back as training data.

What? Can they just look if they fetched certain documents/conversations and feeded them into the training loop?

This is exactly the issue.

What the mathematicians could do is reveal whether they had the data-sharing opt-out on or not. But curiously, as far as I've seen, none of them will answer that question!

undisclosed ones in this case

dude, proper attribution is part of scholarship and academics. Not giving credit to the people whose work led up to your solution is malpractice.

Because in academia, your name and your body of work is a big deal that can open or close doors, and assigning credit is an important part of it. This isn't a new thing/exclusive to the AI era either.

I have the same question, why OpenAI and Anthropic just don't release everything as open source?

I don’t think it is people being possessive but rather people finding their value over the work they do (sentence ended up being weird but I hope the idea is clear).

So I see someone dedicating a sizeable portion of their life on a discovery and not being credited is the problem here. Otherwise it would be published in a journal anyway.

a quote from the article: "Thom said it “would be ethically indefensible” if nonpublic research supplied by users helped to improve models that the company then used to race those very same users to publication, without consent, proper disclosure, or credit."

Because it's not humanity that profits, it's OpenAI.

1. Academic/research credit

2. There was a $1,000,000 reward

There was an other thread on HN where apparently OpenAI promised one of the author half of the prize money IF they remove their co-author (that works for Anthropic) from their paper.

This kind of bribing attempt doesn't seem to come from the "good side"

Not defending it but in academia credit and attribution can be big deals. Some people are motivated by money, some by fame, some by satisfaction from doing the work, some by recognition, most by some mix.

OpenAI is the possessive actor here. They were supposed to develop the AI for the benefit of humanity. Now they do it closed and do it only for their private profit.

As I lay dying here in this basement surrounded by my art, without food or basic necessities as I have given up all thought of material comfort in hopes of bettering the lives of others, I too wonder why others do not follow my example and live with no thought of their own comforts or position in society and strive to do things that may somehow benefit the species as a whole, especially the Billionaire part of that species.

Mathematicians are way more open about what they do than OpenAI is.

Why are people so greedy? Why can't they wait to be given something, or remain content without, rather than take from others by force? I'm genuinely curious too.

They are releasing their work for the profit of the humanity. They do not like OpenAI claiming credit for it. After all, profit of the humanity and profit of the OpenAI are two different things. Maybe even mutually exclusive at this point.

And lying about whether the proof was done by mathematicians or OpenAI is bad humanity, so.

There’s always been a distinction between published work and unpublished.

If my friend showed me some unpublished work (Say 90% of the hardest work toward a significant proof) if I then go finish the remaining 10% and publish the whole thing as mine it isn’t ‘building on the shoulders of giants’ it’s plagiarism/theft.

If he’d published that work first and I took it and found another proof and credited him for his work via citation then that would be fine.

1. Tristan's research direction was known to only a handful of other academics. It might help if you can be more specific regarding the origin of the contamination.

2. If someone did come out and claim that their ideas were used without proper attribution in Tristan's work, then of course, that deserves consideration.

3. What you're suggesting seems purely hypothetical. At present, there is nobody claiming that Tristan's work is "contaminated"

4. Tristan was very willing in his initial statement to give credit to the people who developed the ideas.

This. I don't like people using others' work without giving proper credit. At the same time, people are jumping too quickly to defend these mathematicians without any solid evidence of their claims, while framing this as some sort of "Evil AI Company vs human mathematicians".

In the best case scenario, the mathematicians were standing on the shoulders of the extensive training data from sources that aren't being credited and they may not even have had access to.

I have nothing against these mathematicians because I don't know them. And given that, there's no reason to trust their word any more than OpenAI's.

It's possible the work they were doing, even if related, was a dead end and immaterial to OpenAI's findings. Or maybe they are right and OpenAI stole their work. Who knows the truth right now?

In other words, we need more evidence before making accusations.

So it’s Napster for ideas?