Flutterby™! : Buckmaster vs OpenAI

Tristan Buckmaster has released a statement on his work and some claims by OpenAI, that might have been influenced by his own use of their tools. It's unclear, but the accusations of strong-arming are kinda frightening, and people should consider this when having conversations with hosted LLM models.

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.”

Via danmcquillan @danmcquillan@kolektiva.social who characterized this as "AI maths meets mafia".

Tech Crunch: OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem, says NYU mathematician.

Buckmaster also raised concerns that, because he used Codex extensively in assembling the project, information from his work could have informed OpenAI’s own efforts to solve the problem. OpenAI reserves the right to train models on Codex interactions, although users are able to opt-out. If the OpenAI team used a model trained on Buckmaster’s own Codex interactions, it’s plausible that it could have regurgitated his work when faced with a similar problem.