Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid ā welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Looks like there might be a bit of an openai vs anthropic dick waving competition over mathematical proofs. I havenāt had time to digest all of this yet because it is a bit hard for me to read, but there are a few interesting nuggets in there such as making it clear that the ai firms treat this as a marketing exercise (no surprises there). Theyāre also apparently trying to obscure the amount of human assistance involved (again, no surprises).
The main statement is here: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf
Associated stuff linked from here: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117233413705701198
Do note that the author made heavy use of llm assistance for their work, and does consider it to be the future of developing mathematical proofsā¦ this isnāt human vs ai.
there are tons of issues here. almost impossible to convey how bad things are. in no particular order:
this research breakthrough was a consequence of dumping tons of money into the ai companies. if the future of the field means being entangled with openai et al. and extreme expenses that is going to upend mathematics in a much bigger way than ability to prove new things will. this hasnāt been a focal point of discussion yet but it looks to be at the center of mathematics going forward imo.
possibly for legal reasons, the statement stops short of accusing openai of stealing their in progress work. as in literally snaking their documents off the cloud and using them to try to undercut researchers. but itās very clear that that is what the author believes happened
openai straight up threatened the mathematician in question. in a colloquial sense theyāre engaging in extortion. apparently this is so routine for them that they didnāt even stop to consider that they canāt threaten an academicās career (or they assumed the mathematician would understand there will be no academic careers in the future)
openai is straight up lying about their research methods. there are various ways that their announcements have had the potential to be misleading (for example when you see āwe spent $2000 to compute these proofsā ask how much they spent on attempts that didnāt work). but what theyāre saying may generally just not be true even in a literal sense
OpenAI:
https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:i4bfh2tyxihe2ksplmtcoopk/post/3muznyls6vk2v
The progression from āthe alleged novel parts were actually already in the training dataā to āwe just stole them from some guyās chatbot logsā has been nothing if not organic.
You donāt say.
@supersquirrel@lemmy.ca I suppose this is a score for you apropos our recent discussion on industrial espionage. Although Iāll note that the domain they tried to take over this time (dickwaving with math proofs) does also not have a business model, so theyāre not really working themselves out of their financial death sentence.
Also hard to feel like a point for me when that atrocious Meta settlement with the attorney generals that basically locks in profits via regulatory capture just came outā¦
As someone from the US it feels like a nuclear missile pointed at the fediverseā¦
of course lol, gotta keep that agi ruse up
Glad to see that OpenAI has not changed in their scummy ways. Despite all that has changed in the meantime, they have kept their time-honored tradition of passing off other peopleās work as their own.
One of OpenAIās math announcements a month ago claimed that their results cost only $2000 worth of tokens, which frustrated me because they were likely sweeping away many inconvenient details and almost certainly misrepresenting their true costs. But people took this as a gotcha. This is the same bullshit as the water usage arguments. We are literally seeing city council members signing motherfucking NDAs about this, and you think that water usage numbers provided by the tech companies themselves are going to sway me?
I am also questioning OpenAIās strategy of strip-mining math for PR, since it seems like advances in math do not actually register that well in the public. From what I remember, the Hugging Face incident got a lot more press than any of the math results.
They want to sell the claim that theyāve āachieved AGIā. For the general public they can sell on the vibe of āthe computer talks back to youā, but for more sophisticated audiences, they need something firmer. Everyone with even a fraction of the ability to think for themselves has stopped trusting benchmarks, so OpenAI and Anthropic has been looking for things associated with intelligence they can claim success on. Math proofs have the property of being somewhat automatically checkable, having lots of ideas scattered throughout the literature to let their LLMs sift through, and being associated with intelligence.
And the bonus advantage of an academic community of which a sizable fraction is willing to burn leaded gasoline to truck the child laborers into the sweatshop to paint asbestos with radium, if itāll get them arXiv posts.
yeah I think the push for math results is because they know some of their big investors know enough about how hard/advanced math is and they want to impress them. Burning down an entire academic community is worth it for that
The /r/singularity and orange site responses have been gross, lots of commenters willing to totally overlook the multiple different ways OpenAI has been utter scum in this debacle in order to celebrate another LLM āsuccessā.
Deleting this for now as I donāt have time to rewrite it properly, but Iām sure someone else will do a better job of the plagiarism/training on private data stuff that Iāve missed.
what? that is absolutely not true. ill try to address this on my lunch break but it is way more serious than that
So from what I gathered, two researchers were working on a math problem with the assistance of multiple AIs, but OpenAI beat them to it. The researchers are accusing OpenAI of using their work as training data, which OpenAI denied (edit: said wasnāt intentional and then basically threatened the researcher)
They didnāt deny it, they said if the other workersā research ended up in the training data it wasnāt deliberate. Then they gave the researcher who noticed the similarities a āco-publish with us or elseā offer.
Ah got it
one of them also works for anthropic
also, the unfounded confidence of openai guy makes me think that they might have done that before, and some random grad might have folded much easier under this kind of pressure
and looks like thereās another case of openai thievery https://xcancel.com/ValerioCapraro/status/2097791836269977996 https://bsky.app/profile/timhenke.bsky.social/post/3mv4ouxlnsk2z