alt Hacker NewsFull mastodon post: https://mathstodon.xyz/@[email protected]/11...
Mathematical explanation by Terrance Tao: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117233527638291447
It seems there is much background drama behind this, and this is what I've pieced together of what happened:
Over the past year, Buckmaster and Alpöge have been using AI to work on fluid dynamics maths problems. Alpöge works at Anthropic, which will cause future issues.
In mid-August, they found a counterexample for a simpler version of the Navier-Stokes problem. They spend the next few weeks preparing their paper.
In early September, rumors start spreading on X that Anthropic has solved a Millennium prize problem (and that it's Navier-Stokes). Buckmaster reaches out to OpenAI to explain this is their own personal research, not an Anthropic project.
A few days later, OpenAI gets back to him, and tells him an internal model found has a counterexample for Navier–Stokes, potentially worth the $1 million Millennium prize. The proof uses the same method that Buckmaster and Alpöge chose to work on. They don't show him the proof.
Buckmaster pressed them for more details. OpenAI reveals they had an entire team had been working on the problem, and that they started work in the past few days, after the rumors that Anthropic had solved a Millennium prize problem.
Buckmaster says OpenAI talked about a shared publication timeline. They want to Buckmaster to publish first, then give Buckmaster shared credit for the Millennium Prize when they publish the full result. But they want to exclude Alpöge as an author because he works at Anthropic. An agreement is not reached. Buckmaster had been using OpenAI Codex to draft/check his work, and asks if his private AI chats were used to accelerate OpenAI's result.
Buckmaster and Alpöge think they have found a counterexample for Navier-Stokes, but the paper is not yet presentable. It's unclear what date they found this result.
Because of the situation with OpenAI, they published their existing papers earlier than planned (today), alongside this statement announcing they have a tentative result on Navier-Stokes and revealing the OpenAI drama.
The post is missing context from both sides, and this isn't my field, so hopefully someone else can unpack what's happening here.
Replies
> A few days later, OpenAI gets back to him, and tells him an internal model found a counterexample for Navier–Stokes
Why is OpenAI chatting with him at all at this stage? Is the discussion along the lines of "hey we used the work you are famous for to do a bigger piece of work, just thought you should know" or "heyyy....so we kinda liked what you were typing in your private chat, and thought we'd develop those ideas a bit. and yeah we solved Navier-Stokes in the process. But it's our finding, so do you want like an honorary acknowledgement or do you want to go to court?"
>...has solved a millennium problem and is sitting on the result
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the work involved here is not the actual millennium problem, but it concerns versions with an added external force that the author thinks is a path that may help toward solving the harder unforced problem.
> They were coordinating with OpenAI regarding a publishing timeline, but could not come to an agreement,
Skimming the PDFs it seems much more dramatic than that? It sounds like at least one of them is concerned OpenAI "solved" the problem by having their internal model use the chats of the independent researchers and want to claim the credit instead? I don't know. The tone is pretty accusational though:
> the one Levent and I had quietly chosen to attack. Almost nobody else I know of was working on it. It is not the direction one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement. When I heard “forced,” it was a bright red flag.
> I was shown a prompt and told the internal research model had simply been given the problem statement. Levent had been told by Sebastien “very little human input” had been used. This turned out not to be true. Over the course of the call, as members of their team sent Sebastien corrections and details over their internal chat, it emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem, that this was one of a number of things that was tried, that work had started on the unforced problem, that the team first set the model on easier problems, including Euler, that even the prompt that had been shown to me had been written by prompting Codex, and that an insane amount of compute had been used.
> I asked when the first prompt had been sent by them. This question was not answered directly by OpenAI for some time. Eventually it was agreed that it had been sent in the past few days, after information about our work had reached OpenAI.
> 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. [0]
[0]: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf