BREAKING: OpenAI might have stolen another major proof.
In a detailed Mastodon post, which I report in full in the comments, Andreas Thom presents several pieces of evidence suggesting that OpenAI may have trained Astra on conversations in which he and Gábor Kun were working on Gromov’s soficity conjecture, one of the ten problems OpenAI later announced Astra had solved.
I know Andreas. We met several times early in our careers. He is an exceptional mathematician, a leading expert on sofic and hyperlinear groups, and one of the most respected scholars in the field. He has spent two decades working on this problem.
If his account is correct, this is not a minor dispute over attribution. It would mean that unpublished human work was absorbed into a model and then presented to the world as a breakthrough by the model itself.
And if the allegations raised by Levent Alpöge, Tristan Buckmaster, and now Andreas Thom are all substantiated, we are no longer looking at isolated incidents.
We may be looking at one of the greatest intellectual scandals in the history of science.
AI is not discovering new mathematics.
AI is stealing human discovery.
Not Navier-Stokes, that was a couple days ago, old news. It’s one of the less famous problems they posted around the same time.
Well, one obvious example is licensing. You can have things that are presented online with a terms of service or an actual license that excludes certain uses.
One specific example would be GitHub and the sites like it. There are plenty of public facing code bases with licensing that would prohibit forms of reuse, like for financial gain.
And yes, this appears to be what the researchers believed to be private conversations, but are likely completely owned by the AI companies in their terms of service.
Well, one obvious example is licensing. You can have things that are presented online with a terms of service or an actual license that excludes certain uses.
One specific example would be GitHub and the sites like it. There are plenty of public facing code bases with licensing that would prohibit forms of reuse, like for financial gain.
And yes, this appears to be what the researchers believed to be private conversations, but are likely completely owned by the AI companies in their terms of service.