throwaway1707

Not so dissimilar to my first comment on this site (which I got piled on): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48959395

Except way more nefarious than I expected

Thanks for responding. I don't personally believe you have affiliation, more that OpenAI saw the problem was being worked on, gathered training data for solving it and training the model on it, then eventually you found it through the model (and now it's a big impressive thing for OpenAI)

Part of me agrees with the other comments that it sounds absurd, especially because of how involved/intricate your prompting was. But given you have been prompting this problem for a year, OpenAI could easily have seen your attempts/progress, and worked towards solving it with human intelligence that the agent was then trained on. Given the lengths these companies go to for training these things (Meta literally reorganizing their engineering department to provide training data for engineering problems), and also how much difficulty these models have with problems outside their dataset, I really have to wonder if it's the model being "intelligent" or if it has been trained on it

Terrance Tao has for a fact appeared in promotional material for OpenAI. Based on my Googling the consensus seems to be he is paid for it, but I cannot confirm that.

I do think it's very likely that OpenAI pays for solutions like these to put in the training set, and then we get material like this Reddit thread. They market themselves as selling "intelligence", and solving these math problems is something people view as highly intelligent. I'm not a mathematician, so I cannot fully judge it, but based on my experience using LLMs for novel problems in other domains, they seem to really struggle with things that aren't common. That leads me to believe they train for specific outcomes like this. Also, there are a lot of jobs out there for data annotation, including software problems (Meta has basically reorganized its entire engineering department to create training data for coding problems).

This comment on the Pelican svg better articulates what I'm getting at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48950883

I had to create an account to respond to this because I am quite convinced these math problems they are "solving" are pure marketing. Why is it only GPT doing this, why not Claude? Why does Terrance Tao do marketing for OpenAI? I suspect OpenAI has hired math researchers to solve obscure problems and put them in their training set, purely for marketing reasons.

There was a good comment on the Pelican bicycle svg yesterday about how these models aren't getting much better beyond what the companies focus training them on. I think that's what's happening in this case too, they probably put this in the training set.