alt Hacker News> As a parallel example, can we prove the phase of the moon had no impact on the NS solution? No, not without a bunch experiments run at different phases of the moon.
That reads as incredibly dismissive and condescending. What makes you think you’re in a position to communicate like that when engaging on such a sensitive topic?
I intended no dismissiveness or condescension. My hope was to explain why it's hard to prove whether something affects model behavior. In the case of the moon, we have a strong prior belief that it makes no real difference. But it's hard to prove, because what if there's an unexpected impact from tides, cosmic rays, grid voltages, holiday traffic, etc. Models trained under slightly different conditions could have slightly different weights and behave slightly differently when solving math problems. Similarly, I have a strong expectation that, for example, a thumbs up signal from a ChatGPT chat will not meaningfully affect long-horizon mathematics work in our latest model, but it's always possible that it could. I think the plausibility of the ChatGPT route is higher than the tides, but still incredibly low. I respect Tristan and Levant a great deal and I'm bummed that this controversy has erupted (I acknowledge this will ring hollow if you think it's our fault). It reminds me a bit of the Frontier Math controversy, where people on the internet boldly claimed over and over again that we had trained on the Frontier Math evaluation set, even though we had not.