alt Hacker NewsFirst, OpenAI is not claiming that the model wasn't trained on those sessions. What they've said is “We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem.” and “We did not use their prompts or proofs to prompt our models or direct our agents.” and “While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.”
They also said “Our effort began on September 1st after hearing a rumor which we later realized was related to Levent Alpöge … and Tristan Buckmaster….” They say the rumor was that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved, and that this prompted them to launch "an effort to evaluate it on all open Millennium Prize problems and a few other high-impact problems."
It's not obvious to me that's an unethical thing to do, if it happened as they described.
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We were also curious and we looked further into this. We've determined it was impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training. This goes beyond what we said earlier, when we were less sure.
If prompts were submitted earlier than that and training was not opted out, there may be a chance they made their way into our training pipeline in some form. But this would be a droplet in an ocean and unlikely to have made any difference, in my opinion.
(I work at OpenAI.)
Source for the updated claim: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/science/tristan-buckmaste...
As with all press releases I assume it was written/re viewed/redacted by their lawyers, so:
> no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem
Data was accessed in order to <other purpose> (and then accidentally used in training) Also, is llm’s answer to the prompt actually “user data”?
> We did not use their prompts or proofs …
So they used llm’s answers to those prompts.
> … to prompt our models or directew our agents.
So they trained the model on it. (Training is not prompting and plain model is not an agent)
> we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.”
implied the humans sessions could have been (and probably were, why wouldn’t they be?) in the training set?
If I was trying to make a model smarter and I had transcripts from the smartest mathematicians in the world I’d make sure the model trained on them.
> not claiming that the model wasn't trained on those sessions
The math group inside OpenAI may be training or fine tuning their own models which given some reward functions would definitely bias their usage of the training data towards things that look like math.
You can launder all of it without a human "directly" doing anything.
> It's not obvious to me that's an unethical thing to do, if it happened as they described.
What!? Even if everything OpenAI said is accurate (big hypothesis there!), it's highly unethical to rush a solution because others have jsut had success. And that's the only beginning.
Those statements were about NS, though; I don't think they've made similar statements for the non-sofic groups?
> It's not obvious to me that's an unethical thing to do
In terms of work in mathematics, something I personally would not do based on ethical grounds would be to hear a rumor that some researchers are taking a certain approach and may be nearing a solution, use a model that was possibly contaminated with intimate knowledge about that approach (though later they investigated and think it wasn't), and then commit millions to tens of millions of dollars and untold amounts of hardware to try to beat them to it. If I had done this, I also wouldn't have pestered the researchers on a Sunday night to meet immediately so we could negotiate a nice way of presenting the actions I had decided to take.
Even if you don't think it was unethical, it was never going to be received well in the community that was especially going to care about this work, and who are very much peers to many of the people working on this solution, so it was at the least an enormous (and well-deserved) own-goal that their unveiling of their solution to NS went like this.