Post

another researcher accuses OpenAI of training on conversations and then claiming a breakthrough

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For me, personally, it feels like OpenAI misrepresenting what the model was able to reason about independently. Like, it wasn't sitting in a room thinking. It was rehashing things humans were already thinking (they thought privately), making it more of a Mechanical Turk than AGI

It solved problems no human has managed to solve, including those now making accusations. Was it trained with some intermediate steps towards it? Of course it was, like all human mathematicians have been.

The question here is just whether it had access to some specific steps, which weren't enough for those humans and/or earlier models for easily reaching the end point.

Those folks seem to be ones making unfair claims about theft. It comes down to whether they enabled the setting for improving the model for everyone by training on their data. If they did, they gave their permission. If they didn't, they are making serious accusations with little evidence.

And if such data was used, we don't know if it played any role. Clearly it didn't provide the ultimate solutions, since they didn't have those. And if the part of the data that would have mattered came from the model responses instead of prompts, it would be more like the system training itself.

There may be limits to the evidence that can be gotten from this sort of situation. I do not find it unreasonable for someone to be angered about their work being possibly absorbed into another problem solving intelligence, and their efforts being nullified as such.

yeah, it definitely looks bad and will force openai to respond (good imo), but i find it highly unlikely that it materially improved their performance, but will be hella difficult to prove that

If a user uses the product with "Improve the model for everyone" turned on, that's what it's meant to do. Alpöge sure should have known that as an employee of a company whose products use a similar option. But I haven't seen anything indicating something like that played any role.

agree, but it would be appropriate for openai to acknowledge any contribution, especially if they plan on continuing work with the scientific community

OAI announced 10 solutions to 10 different problems, did they not? At any given time, aren't there people working on those same 10 problems? Did OAI also "steal" their conversations? Or could it be that the coincidence here is two different teams happened to be using OAI software at the same time?

i don’t think this guy put enough effort into proving his accusation. it’s a very severe accusation, and he hardly provided any proof at all

I feel this is happening. A close friend of mine is working in rough paths and he noticed chatgpt recently "suggesting" his own work back at him from a few months ago. I can't say whether it's intentional but I strongly suspect OpenAI is training models on conversations.

They all have memory of the signed-in user now and build a file on your sessions that are used to tune and adjust future session output. Claude knows I want bad news up front without sugar coating and so that's how the responses are, when applicable.

The story of server side has always been a "Trust me bro" story, you can't tell that they train on your data or not but even if their ToS promises they don't, they would be stupid to not train on high quality hand written production ready codebase, it's the easiest way to breakthrough.

I'm not sure training new LLM models is the only issue … seems like even if academics opt out of training, OpenAI may be able to see aggregated 'de-identified' but detailed enough data on what people are using it for to get ideas to pursue.

I ran into this with oncology care plan prediction ten years ago. If there's only 20 people with a rare cancer in a registry, it's 10 minutes to figure out who they are. Not a lot of people using the string 'solicity' in context in prompts. A small sample will have a huge influence.

it was a joke! the idea of researchers at openai using chats for research inspiration just seems incredibly horrific to me, i’m quite certain that’s not what they’re doing

idk i don’t want to be hard on mathematicians, it’s a hard life without a ton of perks. and even the thought of this is pretty frustrating, true or not

In math, people have long complained about articles whose bibliography contains “private communication” items. I see OpenAI decided to do something about it by not citing the relevant private communications!

Transformer models produced training data text verbatim frequently 2+ years ago. The technology itself has not substantially changed. It's plausible that the lower frequency of verbatim output is the result of mitigation rather than absence. Glad if mathematicians are mad. Coders let this happen.

it’s a model training smell. there’s a series of papers that go into why, but a high quality LLM should only be able to quote *in spirit* not verbatim

I haven't seen it since, but Opus 4.5 on bedrock gave me 2 full, exact paragraphs of Tale of Two Cities, without any I/O AFAIK. It has been extremely hard for me to suspend my skepticism when people tell me LLMs don't plagiarize. Small perturbations to avoid string match actually makes me more mad.

that’s a pretty small excerpt but anyway, the NYT wasn’t able to prove it in court. same as several others not to say it’s impossible, it’s just a bug in the training data if it’s memorizing (arguably not for tale of two cities, since it’s meant to be quotable)

it’s probably likely that his work was a candidate for model training openai may still have not trained on it, e.g. if they thought it was too low quality they could filter it out, or synthetically rephrase it still, openai is going to need better data provenance in order to combat allegations

This is a serious issue. I also think it will be a wake-up call to scientists and academics working on cutting edge problems that using subscriptions where training on conversations is explicitly enabled may be unwise. Corporations, e.g., have been wary of this issue from the beginnning, paying ...

orders of magnitudes more for API-based model access w/ a guarantee of no training so they can protect their IP. Scientists should now budget for this. I admittedly thought it was a little paranoid, but if you could have patents, field-defining discoveries, etc. at risk, it clearly seems worth it.

I agree this is a bigger issue than just attribution, however. The issue with companies touting discoveries that their training data made possible is evidently problematic. But now I'm thinking of people at conferences w/ less "brain power" hearing ideas and working on them with AI. Before, it...

> openai is going to need better data provenance in order to combat allegations this increasingly feels like something all saas will need to do. more NPI is material these days imo, and it's more likely than ever to quietly leak via model training

a much simpler alternative is to a paid researcher tier where chatgpt conversations never gets trained on. i’m sure startups would love it too

no question it’s in their training corpus, but unclear if a model actually got trained on it they do a shit ton of filtering & transforming. like, these steps are arguably the major component of a competitive advantage but it also makes it harder to trace which documents actually made it in

his claim is that he turned it on after he started working i’m guessing he turned it on after creating a conversation, and just continued the same conversation, hence his unclarity on what happened also, he didn’t really have much evidence that’s what happened

Yea I’ve been confused by this, I thought ChatGPT has a setting to opt your account out of being used for training. I have that with my Claude account. Is the accusation that they’re ignoring that setting and training on it anyway? Or did these researchers forget to turn that off?

solid evidence here that the mathematician is fabricating the story bsky.app/profile/pekk...

Pekka Lund@pekka.bsky.social

For all that I can see, Andreas Thom seems to be yet another mathematician who makes serious accusations against OpenAI with no evidence or reasonable basis. He says he emailed OpenAI (Bubeck and Sellke) "shortly after" OpenAIs non-sofic group announcement, which happened on August 1.

I found this on the page for chatgpt for academic research: "Workspaces include business-grade privacy and security protections, and data is not used to train our models by default." My take: there are a LOT of ways prompts could leak. Start with 'accidentally uses personal ChatGPT one session'. :|

openai.comAccelerating scientific discovery with ChatGPT for Academic ResearchersOpenAI is giving 100,000 academic researchers free access to ChatGPT's most advanced AI models to accelerate scientific research, collaboration, and discovery.

Well, unlike in Claude which is opt-in for sharing, ChatGPT is opt-out. So theoretically that convo could be legit used by OpenAI. Though the idea that they’d use chats for pre-training is kinda wild.