2026-09-08 07:22 UTC
Replies (7)
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-09-08 11:37
As Talia Ringer has pointed out elsewhere, there major issues from the point of view of mathematicians is the rush to scoop another researcher’s work, which is a dick move, and pressure to drop a co-author who works for a competing AI firm. I’m not an academic, so I saw that as (merely) another shitty and unreasonable thing, and failed to understand that this would have been academic fraud and should put a serious or terminal dent in the career of the people engaged in it. I guess it’s another example of ai firms treating the sources of their training data and their fellow travellers as resources to be strip-mined, not maintained. Even livestock would get a bit more consideration.
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-09-08 14:00
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.
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@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-09-08 14:46
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?
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@sc_griffith@awful.systems 2026-09-08 16:47
there are tons of issues here. almost impossible to convey how bad things are. in no particular order: 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. 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 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) 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
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-09-08 18:58
They’re also apparently trying to obscure the amount of human assistance involved of course lol, gotta keep that agi ruse up
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@scruiser@awful.systems 2026-09-09 01:28
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”.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-09-09 18:57
So from what I gathered, two researchers were working on a math problem with the assistance of multiple AIs, but OpenAI beat them to it. The researchers are accusing OpenAI of using their work as training data, which OpenAI denied