meemi's Shortform

meemi

FrontierMath was funded by OpenAI.^[1]

The communication about this has been non-transparent, and many people, including contractors working on this dataset, have not been aware of this connection. Thanks to 7vik for their contribution to this post.

Before Dec 20th (the day OpenAI announced o3) there was no public communication about OpenAI funding this benchmark. Previous Arxiv versions v1-v4 do not acknowledge OpenAI for their support. This support was made public on Dec 20th.^[1]

Because the Arxiv version mentioning OpenAI contribution came out right after o3 announcement, I'd guess Epoch AI had some agreement with OpenAI to not mention it publicly until then.

The mathematicians creating the problems for FrontierMath were not (actively)^[2] communicated to about funding from OpenAI. The contractors were instructed to be secure about the exercises and their solutions, including not using Overleaf or Colab or emailing about the problems, and signing NDAs, "to ensure the questions remain confidential" and to avoid leakage. The contractors were also not communicated to about OpenAI funding on December 20th. I believe there were named authors of the paper that had no idea about OpenAI funding.

I believe the impression for most people, and for most contractors, was "This benchmark’s questions and answers will be kept fully private, and the benchmark will only be run by Epoch. Short of the companies fishing out the questions from API logs (which seems quite unlikely), this shouldn’t be a problem."^[3]

Now Epoch AI or OpenAI don't say publicly that OpenAI has access to the exercises or answers or solutions. I have heard second-hand that OpenAI does have access to exercises and answers and that they use them for validation. I am not aware of an agreement between Epoch AI and OpenAI that prohibits using this dataset for training if they wanted to, and have slight evidence against such an agreement existing.

In my view Epoch AI should have disclosed OpenAI funding, and contractors should have transparent information about the potential of their work being used for capabilities, when choosing whether to work on a benchmark.

^{^}
Arxiv v5 (Dec 20th version) "We gratefully acknowledge OpenAI for their support in creating the benchmark."
^{^}
I do not know if they have disclosed it in neutral questions about who is funding this.
^{^}
This is from a comment by a non-Epoch AI person on HackerNews from two months ago. Another example: Ars Technica writes "FrontierMath's difficult questions remain unpublished so that AI companies can't train against it." in a news article from November.

meemi2y*28996

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Kabir Kumar1y10

For future collaborations, we will strive to improve transparency wherever possible, ensuring contributors have clearer information about funding sources, data access, and usage purposes at the outset.

Would you make a statement that would make you legally liable/accountable on this?

2Kabir Kumar1y

People's heart being in the right place doesn't stop them from succumbing to incentives, just changes how long it will take them to do so and what excuses they will make. Solution is better incentives. Seems that Epoch AI isn't set up with a robust incentive structure atm. Hope this changes.

5plex2y

Agree that takeoff speeds are more important, and expect that FrontierMath has much less affect on takeoff speed. Still think timelines matter enough that the amount of relevantly informing people that you buy from this is likely not worth the cost, especially if the org is avoiding talking about risks in public and leadership isn't focused on agentic takeover, so the info is not packaged with the info needed for that info to have the effects which would help.