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anaguma

Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematician at NYU's Courant Institute, says OpenAI researchers told him that an internal model had produced a proof of finite-time blowup for the Navier-Stokes equations with smooth forcing. If correct, this would resolve the Millennium Prize problem in the negative.

Buckmaster and his collaborator Levent Alpöge (who works at Anthropic) had spent a year working on this problem, with the help of Claude and Codex, and had released Lean-verified proofs for related problems. He was concerned that OpenAI might have been training on their Codex sessions. He described a call with Sébastien Bubeck and another OpenAI mathematician as follows:

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."
Some time later Levent received a text proposing that he and Sebastien speak one on one, saying, "I don't know if Tristan is being fully rational right now." Levent declined and said conversations should be with me. Sebastien sent a follow-up email that night requesting to speak with me on Monday, September 7th. I did not respond.
I would like to be clear about what I am not claiming. I have not seen OpenAI's proof. I do not know what their model did, or how. I do not know whether our data was used. I am not accusing anyone of anything. I am stating what I was told, when, and what was proposed to me. I am stating it because the alternative is to let a sequence of announcements say something I know to be false.

This is pretty egregiously bad behavior from OpenAI IMO. This is not how a frontier lab should be interacting with the math community.

anaguma2mo14523

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1MichaelLowe2mo

Isn't the implication of him being the person to write it up that the NYU mathematician would get the (?) millennium prize? This sure sounds generous to me, I am sure OpenAI has no shortage of mathematicians on staff that would like to do this.

Amalthea2mo10

It's about who contributed significantly to the final solution in terms of developing the necessary mathematical ideas (and I believe it's unclear what to do if an AI did all the intellectual labor).

This is not something you can hand out. Clearly there's enough ambiguity so that different reasonable arrangements can benefit different people, so it's still possible to be more or less respectful when you go about creating outputs, but generosity is really the wrong frame. (In some cases, like if you're an advisor, and you invite your student to help on your work it could apply)

4Amalthea2mo

If the pressure tactics described by Buckmaster here are true, I think this is a really bad showing of OpenAI and Bubeck should reasonably face consequences. It doesn't seem like either party is super trustworthy though, so it's unclear whom to believe.