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Title: Math Professor Accuses OpenAI of Copying His Work, Says AI Compute
Power Makes Racing to Publish 'Pointless'

Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/09/14/2...

The New York Post wrote that OpenAI "stunned the mathematics world" last week
when it announced its AI model "cracked a legendary math problem left
unsolved for nearly a century in just 88 hours." But a New York University
professor "has come forward alleging OpenAI may have copied his work after
asking him to collaborate - with one of the company's scientists allegedly
warning he might 'ruin his career' if he refused." [P]rofessor Tristan
Buckmaster, a British-Australian researcher who trained in Germany... had
been working with Long Island-raised math prodigy Levent Alp�ge, a researcher
with OpenAI rival Anthropic, on a different elusive fluid dynamics equation,
known as the Euler problem, when he found a solution using AI tools from both
Anthropic and ChatGPT. He said scientists from OpenAI approached him and
tried to convince him to jointly announce the solution, claiming they had
independently solved Navier-Stokes. Buckmaster questioned the timing of their
finding the solution in a blog post, noting OpenAI had only done so "in the
past few days" - after the company became aware of his work. He asked OpenAI
experts whether its AI systems used to solve the equation had been "trained
on, or had access to" his research, but said they declined to answer,
prompting him to wonder how they had advanced toward the solution so quickly.
The puzzle is "not the direction one arrives at in a few days," Buckmaster
wrote incredulously... In OpenAI's post on its website sharing the Navier-
Stokes proof, which it credited to Astra, the company's latest AI bot, the
firm insisted no user data was incorporated into its model to solve the
problem. However, it noted that it "cannot rule out" that anonymized data was
used to "improve our models." "We congratulate Levent Alp�ge and Tristan
Buckmaster on their remarkable mathematical work," OpenAI said in the
announcement. Buckmaster shot back, "Is it ethical to use customer's data to
try to scoop their customer?" Alp�ge's affiliation with Anthropic "seems to
have been a sore point for OpenAI," writes TechCrunch. Buckmaster's public
statement says the OpenAI's Sebastien "twice asserted that he wanted Levent
removed from authorship" and also said that "it was so annoying that Levent
works at Anthropic" - but that Buckmaster still refused to remove the
Anthropic mathematician's credit. 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?" [OpenAI's Bubeck said later on X that he'd meant
unfounded accusations could damage Buckmaster's 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."
Buckmaster later told Australia's public broadcaster ABC that the companies
building AI "have zero respect for the scientific community. I mean, it's
appalling, honestly." But he went on to say AI has made the race to publish
mathematical breakthroughs pointless. "I think it's pointless. Like, I think
the game is up...." Professor Buckmaster said he and Dr Alp�ge had more
research they could publish but questioned the point of racing ahead with it
when AI could perform work that had previously occupied researchers for
years. He said there needed to be a discussion about how mathematics should
operate in this new environment. Professor Buckmaster said some
mathematicians had stopped publicly sharing what they were working on to
avoid tipping off AI companies about their plans. He has called on academics
and people from OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind to discuss ground rules for
how they worked together. He said the companies' power carried
responsibilities that went beyond competing to solve problems before their
rivals... Building on the work of mathematicians Diego C�rdoba and Luis
Mart�nez-Zoroa, the pair found a solution to the Euler problem, a stepping
stone to the Navier-Stokes problem. Professor Buckmaster said he spent weeks
checking and improving the "slop" proofs generated by AI... For now,
Professor Buckmaster said he wanted to finish existing work and support his
PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, rather than chase another
Millennium Prize. "I think it's more important to re-evaluate what math is,"
he said. "The New York University professor also warned Australia about the
centralisation of resources into the hands of a small number of privately
owned foreign companies..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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