How is a claim, "clear evidence" to anything?
Unlike seemingly most here on HN, I judge people's trustworthiness individually and not solely by the organization they belong to. Noam Brown is a well known researcher in the field and I see no reason to doubt these claims other than a vague distrust of OpenAI or big tech employees generally which I reject.
The one OpenAI "scandal" that I did agree with was the thing where they threatened to cancel people's vested equity if they didn't sign a non-disparagement agreement. They did apologize for that one and make changes. But it doesn't have a lot to do with their research claims.
I'm open to actual evidence that OpenAI's research claims are untrustworthy, but again, I also judge people individually, not just by the organization they belong to.
Not disclosing a conflict of interest is generally considered a significant ethics violation, because it reduces trust in the general scientific/research system. Thus OpenAI has become untrustworthy in many people's view irrespective if their involvement with the benchmarks creation affected their results or not.
This is certainly a courageous viewpoint – I imagine this makes it very hard for you to engage in the modern world? Most of us are very bound by institutions we operate in!
Me: I have a way to turn lead into gold.
You: Show me!!!
Me: NO (and then spends the rest of my life in poverty).
Cold Fusion (physics not the programing language) is the best example of why you "Show your work". This is the Valley we're talking about. It's the thudnderdome of technology and companies. If you have a meaningful breakthrough you don't talk about it you drop it on the public and flex.
When my wife tells me there's a pie in the oven and it's smelling particularly good, I don't demand evidence or disbelieve the existence of the pie. And I start to believe that it'll probably be a particularly good pie.
This is from OpenAI. Here they've not been so great with public communications in the past, and they have a big incentive in a crowded marketplace to exaggerate claims. On the other hand, it seems like a dumb thing to say unless they're really going to deliver that soon.
This is called marketing.
> When my wife tells me there's a pie in the oven and it's smelling particularly good, I don't demand evidence
Because you have evidence, it smells.
And if later your ask your wife "where is the pie" and she says "I sprayed pie scent in the air, I was just singling" how are you going to feel?
Open AI spent its "fool us once" card already. Doing things this way does not earn back trust, failure to deliver (and they have done that more than once) ... See staff non disparagement, see the math fiasco, see open weights.
Many signals are marketing, but the purpose of signals is not purely to develop markets. We all have to determine what we think will happen next and how others will act.
> Because you have evidence, it smells.
I think you read that differently than what I intended to write -- she claims it smells good.
> Open AI spent its "fool us once" card already.
> > This is from OpenAI. Here they've not been so great with public communications in the past, and they have a big incentive in a crowded marketplace to exaggerate claims.
>> Unlike seemingly most here on HN, I judge people's trustworthiness individually and not solely by the organization they belong to.
That has nothing to do with anything I said. A claim can be false without it being fraudulent, in fact most false claims are probably not fraudulent; though, still, false.
Claims are also very often contested. See e.g. the various claims of Quantum Superiority and the debate they have generated.
Science is a debate. If we believe everything anyone says automatically, then there is no debate.
Some researchers got a breakthrough and decided to share right then rather than the months later it would take for a viable product. It happens, researchers are humans after all and i'm generally glad to take a peek at the actual frontier rather than what's behind by many months.
You can and it's fair to ignore such claims until that part but i think anything more than that is fairly uncharitable for the situation.