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points by KoolKat23 2 days ago | 0 comments
This line of thought was made popular following the Navier-stokes thing, sadly it was only confirmed after the news died down that there was 100% no way that it used the involved researchers discussions with OpenAI in its output.

Quid pro quo, the models helping you, you're helping the model. Simple as that. Opt out of training if you have an issue with that.

[–] whynotminot 2 days ago
It was always a very stupid line of attack but it has unfortunately now become part of the narrative.
[–] irthomasthomas 2 days ago
Where did you read that?
[–] phoghed 2 days ago
So the claim is basically “OpenAI's Navier–Stokes work benefited from unpublished scientific research submitted by its users”, Buckmaster and Alpöge more specifically

This is of course unsubstantiated, and probably impossible to do so from the outside.

OpenAI said

> Following an investigation, we have confirmed that Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the two months preceding this announcement and paper on September 8, 2026, could not have influenced the system in any way, including through training.

OpenAI initially said it was uncertain whether or not it could have happened. Following investigation they said the above. And that no user input beyond whatever date could have affected the system.

So the question is do you believe this or not? Short of an external audit the answer will be “no” for many people who will continue to repeat as fact that OpenAI stole and laundered the solution. Even if an external audit found nothing, there’d still be people who didn’t believe it and kept repeating the same lines they read from other commenters. Even the original researcher isn’t making claims as strong as the average HN user is doing on his behalf.

The only thing that’s really substantiated is that OpenAI’s research on Navier-Stokes was done because of knowledge of competing work.

[–] sobellian 2 days ago
Sadly the bullshit asymmetry principle has been supercharged in the AI era though I think many imagined it would be the AI's doing rather than jealous, paranoid humans. Now we have incorrect but widely applied folk wisdom that OAI's tech is just rehashing old research.