So using someone’s models makes someone who works for the competitor not “independent”? When their coauthor is? What does that even mean?
I almost stopped reading this extra long post entirely at that point.
This is not a good look in my book.
> Importantly it was admitted that internal Anthropic models had been used in their proof of Euler blowup; I therefore felt I could not consider Levent to be an independent academic.
If an Anthropic employee is doing independent research, but with models that aren't available to the public (because they're internal models), then . . . idk. It's not clear to me why that should necessarily require a refusal to cooperate between OpenAI and Anthropic employees who are excited about solving a problem like this.
For me, the bigger question here is what "internal models" means to these employees, especially in the context of the OpenAI employees repeatedly avoiding directly answering whether their model had been trained on Tristan's and Levent's ongoing work on the problem. It had always seemed like a loophole that AI companies might be tempted to exploit: yeah, they can say that they won't train on your data, but if an AI company doesn't care about ethics, they might go ahead and train a model for internal use only on everyone's data anyway, just to have as much data as possible and potentially gain an advantage in what the company can internally do. They could never publicly release any versions of a model like that, of course. And of course this is speculation.
If true, that's generous and beyond the level of generosity one should expect. Extending that courtesy (beyond academic norms) to a competitor is expecting too much. It take a result OpenAI spent millions of dollars on, and put "Anthropic Researcher" right on the cover.
This is, of course, taking OpenAI's side of the story at face value. But it is a consistent, coherent, and ethically justifiable series of events, if indeed it happened that way.
If OpenAI thinks someone should be the lead author for a paper, that person should have full discretion to decide who the co-authors are.
Even if the co-author's contributions were non-technical
So no, there's no world where you can ethically extend the right to publish a result and decide who the authors are from the outside.
> If true, that's generous and beyond the level of generosity one should expect
"We highly likely stole your work, and threatened you with 'this is bad for your career' and we refuse to acknowledge any work by your collaborator just because he works at a competitor, but we are so so so so generous"
Additionally, according to the researcher, OpenAI's proof follows the same approach they used, and which was largely unused in academia, but OpenAI claimes they arrived at it immediately.
Ain’t no way you read one 100 page paper let alone two with enough understanding to make such a claim.
You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
> internal Anthropic models had been used in their proof ...