Math Professor Accuses OpenAI of Copying His Work, Says AI Compute Power Makes Racing to Publish 'Pointless' (abc.net.au)
- Reference: 0185652150
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/09/14/2246218/math-professor-accuses-openai-of-copying-his-work-says-ai-compute-power-makes-racing-to-publish-pointless
- Source link: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-11/racing-to-solve-maths-problems-pointless-tristan-buckmaster-says/107141628
But a New York University professor "has come forward alleging OpenAI may have copied his work after asking him to collaborate — with one of the company's scientists allegedly warning he might 'ruin his career' if he refused."
> [P]rofessor Tristan Buckmaster, a British-Australian researcher who trained in Germany... had been working with Long Island-raised math prodigy Levent Alpöge, a researcher with OpenAI rival Anthropic, on a different elusive fluid dynamics equation, known as the Euler problem, when he found a solution using AI tools from both Anthropic and ChatGPT. He said scientists from OpenAI approached him and tried to convince him to jointly announce the solution, claiming they had independently solved Navier-Stokes. Buckmaster questioned the timing of their finding the solution in a blog post, noting OpenAI had only done so "in the past few days" — after the company became aware of his work. He asked OpenAI experts whether its AI systems used to solve the equation had been "trained on, or had access to" his research, but said they declined to answer, prompting him to wonder how they had advanced toward the solution so quickly. The puzzle is "not the direction one arrives at in a few days," Buckmaster wrote incredulously...
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> In OpenAI's post on its website sharing the Navier-Stokes proof, which it credited to Astra, the company's latest AI bot, the firm insisted no user data was incorporated into its model to solve the problem. However, it noted that it "cannot rule out" that anonymized data was used to "improve our models."
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> "We congratulate Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster on their remarkable mathematical work," OpenAI said in the announcement.
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> Buckmaster shot back, "Is it ethical to use customer's data to try to scoop their customer?"
Alpöge's affiliation with Anthropic "seems to have been a sore point for OpenAI," [3]writes TechCrunch . [4]Buckmaster's public statement says the OpenAI's Sebastien "twice asserted that he wanted Levent removed from authorship" and also said that "it was so annoying that Levent works at Anthropic" — but that Buckmaster still refused to remove the Anthropic mathematician's credit.
> I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, "Why would you ruin your career?" [OpenAI's Bubeck [5]said later on X that he'd meant unfounded accusations could damage Buckmaster's career.] I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, "If you don't want me to be nice, then I don't have to be nice."
Buckmaster later told Australia's public broadcaster ABC that the companies building AI " [6]have zero respect for the scientific community . I mean, it's appalling, honestly." But he went on to say AI has made the race to publish mathematical breakthroughs pointless.
> "I think it's pointless. Like, I think the game is up...." Professor Buckmaster said he and Dr Alpöge had more research they could publish but questioned the point of racing ahead with it when AI could perform work that had previously occupied researchers for years.
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> He said there needed to be a discussion about how mathematics should operate in this new environment. Professor Buckmaster said some mathematicians had stopped publicly sharing what they were working on to avoid tipping off AI companies about their plans. He has called on academics and people from OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind to discuss ground rules for how they worked together. He said the companies' power carried responsibilities that went beyond competing to solve problems before their rivals...
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> Building on the work of mathematicians Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa, the pair found a solution to the Euler problem, a stepping stone to the Navier-Stokes problem. Professor Buckmaster said he spent weeks checking and improving the "slop" proofs generated by AI...
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> For now, Professor Buckmaster said he wanted to finish existing work and support his PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, rather than chase another Millennium Prize. "I think it's more important to re-evaluate what math is," he said.
"The New York University professor also warned Australia about the centralisation of resources into the hands of a small number of privately owned foreign companies..."
[1] https://nypost.com/2026/09/09/tech/openai-says-it-cracked-decades-old-math-problem-but-professor-claims-they-cribbed-his-work-threatened-him/
[2] https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/09/08/2228220/openai-says-it-has-cracked-one-of-maths-millennium-problems
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/08/openai-fought-dirty-on-career-making-math-problem-says-nyu-mathematician/
[4] https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf
[5] https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310
[6] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-11/racing-to-solve-maths-problems-pointless-tristan-buckmaster-says/107141628
Disturbing minds (Score:2)
The way OpenAI operates is as weird as Altman's stare.
Sociopathic odd balls.
Its a marketing war between AI to invent the best bullshit value for something they are beginning to realise customers don't value or have much need for.
Stop calling it AI and call it an iffy search v2.0 . It's not weighting ads in the output, yet , just doesn't know when its wrong
Re: (Score:1)
If I had a dime for every time AI hallucinated an answer that was pure BS, I'd have a down payment on a Wataburger combo. I'm not sure AI should be called AI.
Re: Disturbing minds (Score:2)
I think AI is a great term.
It's ARTIFICIAL intelligence. It's not real intelligence.
The problem is somehow people think it means real intelligence and treat it as such.
AI companies stealing business secrets? (Score:5, Insightful)
Could anyone seriously be surprised to find that AI companies utilize this perfect scenario where naive people voluntarily hand over all their "business secrets" to them? Other "cloud"-services at least had to put in the effort to comb through all what is stored on the computers they rent out in order to find something of value to sell... but hosted LLM services pretty much only get the "interesting latest development" stuff handed to by their users, and those users already pay for the service to semantically analyze these inputs. A dream scenario for data brokers.
Re: (Score:2)
Can you even trust locally deployed models? Maybe if they're completely isolated from the outside, but remember that OpenAI and Anthropic like to claim their models are SUPER HACKERS ABLE TO BREAK ANY SANDBOX now. So you'd have to install them on an air-gapped compute cluster and only allow direct access. That's an awful expensive system with limited utility, but the alternative is the board finds out you lost trade secrets due to incompetence.
Remember to remind everyone that, according to OpenAI and An
Re: (Score:3)
The only thing local models do is produce text. Unless you run it in a harness which sees it generate "send all your data to www.evil.com" and actually does that, the model can't do anything.
For a lot of uses like coding, the model has to have harness support for things like reading and writing files, but for basic chat-bots they just have to generate text and the harness has to display it.
Re: (Score:2)
> Can you even trust locally deployed models? Maybe if they're completely isolated from the outside, but remember that OpenAI and Anthropic like to claim their models are SUPER HACKERS ABLE TO BREAK ANY SANDBOX now.
Models only accept input, convert it into tokens, perform some probabilistic match functions, and emit tokens. You need to hook them up to a piece of software that interprets those outputs as commands and feeds the results back to the model to give it any kind of agency. This is an agent harness. The permissions you give an agent harness are on you. There is no reason you have to hook your harness up to a full shell, especially if you are just trying to do some math research.
Also, those scenarios where
Makes me wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
How many of the other miraculous math solutions attributed to LLMs recently were similarly snooped from academics who bowed to pressure to stay silent on the matter?
Re: Makes me wonder (Score:3)
It's not stealing if you take a little bit from a large number of people.
Re: (Score:1)
Ah, yes, from the documentary film "Superman III"
Re: (Score:3)
It is stealing if you do not cite all of them in your publication. The standards for scientific misconduct are VERY clear: You are not allowed to hide your sources.
Re: (Score:2)
And meanwhile it's very clear that LLMs cannot cite their sources. When they claim they have done so, a review of the alleged citation generally reveals that it does not in fact support the claims, much like when using Google you find that the page does not in fact include the terms you searched for. And ironically, Google does both of those things to you, because IME Gemini's citations are almost never legitimate.
Re: (Score:3)
Pretty much all of them so far. OpenAI is clearly looking to brute force science problems by hook and by crook and take credit wherever possible. They have a profitability deadline coming up, after all.
It's a good lesson, though. Don't talk to your AI like it's a confidante. It's a spy, and your secrets aren't safe. And when OpenAI goes bankrupt, your secrets will be sold to the next buyer.
Re: (Score:2)
Obviously, I agree.
My other question, is how long will they be able to get away with this sort of thing, before customers decide the risk of disclosing your data to these external AI firms, is greater than the cost of building the capacity to run your own models in-house.
I don't use LLM, generally. But I was messing around and got some older models running on my laptop last night. Nothing special, no idea what I would use them for (couldn't generate a paragraph of text before clearing losing all coheren
Re: (Score:2)
It is no surprise that quite a few enterprises have strict prohibitions against putting any company data into LLMs.
Also the OWASP LLM Top 10 (https://genai.owasp.org/resource/owasp-genai-llm-top-10-2026/) list this as the 2nd most serious risk.
Re: (Score:2)
That is easy: All of them. LLMs cannot do original work because they have no mechanism for insight. Yes, the LLM cultists will aggressively dispute that fact.
why? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you have something you want to take credit for then why would you put it on the public internet? AI cannot break a proper authentication system protected by a 15 character random password as far as I know.
Re: (Score:3)
In academic research it is common to share your data for fellow academics to see, review, reference or perhaps even help you with a new idea.
The problem this is going to cause is that no one wants their life's work to be sniped and credited to AI for solving it. The end result is that even if some academics stop sharing their work publicly because of this, the rate of academic progress will generally slow down as research goes private behind a wall from AI capture.
Re: (Score:2)
It is similar to the current problem with AI and open source. Which isn't surprising, since the open source movement and Free software especially originated in academic circles. The issue in both cases is that a valuable resource has been created cooperatively, and the mechanism of enforcement of norms is purely social. Hence it is vulnerable to exploitation and sloppification by AI companies, which are deliberately not following any norms.
If someone has a solution, now would be a good time to start devel
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. Also, stealing somebody else's work in this way is basically career-death for academics. They may lose their job and become unemployable. They may lose their PhD. Hence it does happen very rarely. Obviously the LLMs and their handlers have no such qualms.
Meh (Score:2)
Everyone is annoying right now.
OpenAI has no good history in negotiations. Remember the "voice of ChatGPT"?
Would you license your voice? No
We found a voice actress that sounds like you!
Then I dislike people saying they keep their science secret so AI doesn't see it. In the hard sciences, one usually is happy about advancements, not about keeping it secret until one publishes oneself. Yeah, people finishing your half-done work is sometimes a problem, but generally there is enough math work for all and AI and
Re: Meh (Score:2)
I wouldn't use a cloud provider without encrypting data if it was something I cared about. Yes I know there are extroverts that like to share everything. I like to have a million dollars in my bank account, but there are certain realities about the real world we must face. One of them is that technology helps people in a lot of ways, but it also makes the world worse and harder to live in a lot of ways. Also cheating has been normalized. Now cheating is called winning few argue against it.
Re: (Score:1)
> Everyone is annoying right now.
Then allow me to annoy you more, asshole!
Re: (Score:2)
Competition comes from competere "strive in common, strive after something in company with or together,".
Complaining about people achieving things which might benefit you because they are doing it partly for selfish reasons is some of the whiniest bullshit possible.
Re: (Score:2)
In the hard sciences, one usually is happy about advancements, not about keeping it secret until one publishes oneself.
Haha, no.
If you don't publish papers, you don't get a job and so you won't be doing hard science anymore due to an imperative to eat and find shelter. So no, no one is happy if someone takes their mostly complete results and scoops them to publication. It's also why that's widely regarded as what's technically known as a "dick move".
Professors and games (Score:1)
I always thought mathematical problems were meant to be solved because their solutions could somehow improve our understanding of the world and, ultimately, the human condition, not merely because someone could be the first to publish them.
Re: (Score:2)
> I always thought mathematical problems were meant to be solved because their solutions could somehow improve our understanding of the world and, ultimately, the human condition, not merely because someone could be the first to publish them.
No. There are many mathematicians (N) and there are probably many more opinions about why they do math, with "because it's fun" or "because I read about the notes in the margin and always wondered if I could be the one" probably at least as common as "understanding the world". If you want to understand the world you become a physicist, a biologist or, if you are young and naive a sociologist.
Re: (Score:3)
False, that hasn't been the case since the 1950s.
All the math problems that fit that description are also "physics problems," and all the mathy ones have been solved. Everything unsolved in physics is either something we can't measure for an experiment (usually because it's at a cosmic scale, where we can't even calibrate an instrument in less than thousands of years, but sometimes because it's a state that only exists for a minuscule time) or something we don't even know about.
"Unsolved math problems" are
Once again intelligence and courage dont mix (Score:1)
A company threatening your career should be ean immediate no
Re: Once again intelligence and courage dont mix (Score:2)
Too bad idiocy and courage are like peas and carrots.
Re: (Score:2)
A company openly engaging in extortion should have its charter revoked and its CEO behind bars.
If Buckmaster has proof of that exchange, the rest of this is all just a colorful backstory.
Read Bubeck's response, not just Bumaster version (Score:5, Informative)
We've discussed this already on Slashdot here [1]https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/09/08/2228220/openai-says-it-has-cracked-one-of-maths-millennium-problems [slashdot.org]. Bubeck, the research at OpenAI has a very different take on this entire situation here [2]https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7503148080888893440/ [linkedin.com]. I will quote his reponse:
> I would like to clarify a few things:
> 1) The screenshot is my reaching out to Levent to coordinate our releases. I hope it’s clear from the message that we came in with the best possible intentions.
> 2) I never ever asked for Levent to be removed from authorship of his own work (as indicated by my text). I was surprised to learn during the call with Tristan that they had only solved Euler and not Navier-Stokes; after learning this we brainstormed possible paths forward. One option we discussed was that Tristan could be the lead author on a rewrite of OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes proof. It is in that context that I said “it would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee” because I felt it would be inappropriate for an Anthropic employee to author OpenAI’s work. 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. Another option I wanted to propose (but got cut short) is to offer access to our internal model so that they could try to finish their proof and bridge the gap between Euler and NS. Again I did not know how to navigate giving access to internal OpenAI IP to an Anthropic employee.
> 3) To reiterate it plainly: as my text clearly indicates, and as I said during our call, OpenAI's intention was to do everything possible to celebrate their mathematical achievements and the heroic efforts that they made on Euler. In the call I was immediately met with a litany of slander, including direct threats that if we were to announce Navier-Stokes he would immediately go to the press with a barrage of unfounded accusations. I refuted all these accusations but he replied “there is nothing you can do, I simply do not trust you”. I was confused why one would turn an incredible source for celebration (of their achievements!) into such bickering, which is when I said that I did not understand why one would risk their career [over unfounded accusations]. Genuinely, at that moment, I was trying to care for him and do a last ditch attempt to get a chance to give them all the credits that they deserve. I deeply apologize for this extremely poor choice of words, it is the opposite of what I was trying to convey. (I should say that I retracted them on the spot by the way.)
> 4) Overall, on a personal level, it was incredibly difficult to have these conversations. Levent refused to attend any of the meetings despite my repeated asking. As Sholto Douglas said, there will need to be coordination between Anthropic and OpenAI in the future; I felt I was doing a proxy negotiation with Anthropic while the Anthropic employee refused to directly participate.
As I said in that thread, I don't know whose version of events is accurate here, but some of the details due support Bubeck's version. I suspect that a breakdown of communication occurred where both then misinterpreted what the other saying in a more hostile way than it was intended until the conversation then became genuinely hostile. In terms of the math, although I'm a mathematician, differential equations is pretty far from my expertise, so I cannot deeply evaluate how close the methods were. However, it is the case that the both were building on the methods of Cordoba-Martinez-Zoroa. In this context, my being far from this sort of work is relevant, because this was a well known enough approach that even t
[3]Read the rest of this comment...
[1] https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/09/08/2228220/openai-says-it-has-cracked-one-of-maths-millennium-problems
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7503148080888893440/
[3] https://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=24097750&cid=66338290
Re: (Score:1)
I'm not part of the anti-AI brigade, but I do see some serious problems here with the timing.
In the scientific world, you'd have to say that it would be very rare for major discoveries to be uncovered within weeks, like what just happened with Euler and Navier-Stokes. The overwhelming reason for this fast pace, is the ongoing AI company one upmanship. The goal is to pander to the market, and has nothing to do with scientific discovery. If OpenAI was interested in scientific discovery, why wouldn't they invi
Re: (Score:2)
This is my dumb opinion, but academia is meant to be iterated upon by others referencing work. Just as "publish or die" is an academic addage, failing to adopt new tools is also death.
In other words (Score:3)
OpenAI was remotely watching his work as he used their tool, and when they determined his stuff was interesting, they grabbed it and published first. They basically piggybacked on the work of a mathematician, for 99 percent of a marathon, and then used their massive compute advantage to sprint the last 100 yards to take the first place medal. Absolutely. No. Surprise. Too bad for the guy - ouch hard life lesson.
This should not be a surprise to anyone (Score:1)
For a technology, and now an entire industry, founded on massive IP theft, fraud, and C-Suite thuggery, this story should not be surprise to anyone, especially the part about Sam Altman stealing credit for someone else's work.
That settles it... (Score:2)
This unreleased OpenAI model is absolutely unqualified to be a professor at Cambridge, even if it did create this proof when it was just weeks old (depending on how one counts). Let's just hope that it doesn't commit suicide, and that those who reported its apparent misconduct aren't punished for doing so.
Re: (Score:2)
Really? Trying to score some points for the right wing / free speech / some other whining weasely bollocks; [1] with a suicide story? [bbc.co.uk]
Entrope has a spiteful little mind today.
It can go back to pulling legs off spiders now.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1j1ye6n30no
Re: (Score:2)
Are you so triggered by the fact that Cambridge was more proactive about plagiarism than OpenAI? Or just that I pointed that out?
Re: (Score:1)
Something that isn't alive can't commit suicide...
So sad to see (Score:2)
Amazing new tech does amazing things
All of the headlines and discussion are about "stealing" work
OpenAI says training data ended too early (Score:2)
As I understand it, there are a couple of main claims here:
(1) OpenAI heard Buckmaster and AlpÃge were making major progress on the Navier-Stokes problem with AI methods (and maybe had some inkling of their path from prior published work), then rushed to scoop them on it, using about $23M of compute time in 88 hours. This seems to be true (and unethical/shady), but I donâ(TM)t know if it would be considered academic malpractice.
(2) Buckmaster speculates that OpenAIâ(TM)s model may have been t
Re: OpenAI says training data ended too early (Score:2)
Because the "dear diary, how do i get to a billy?" guy is to be trusted, especially in a forum like a podcast, probably of the ass sucking shill type...
They're stealing everybody's shit (Score:2)
They log everything for "training or QA purposes" and then sift out and focus on interesting work. Then they steal it and claim the idea to be something their fake, unintelligent guessing machine came up with. There's no intelligence in AI... it's all a guy hiding behind a computer stealing other people's ideas
This is no different than... (Score:2)
Say HP had a guy who watched your print spooler and stole your award winning ideas before the ink dried, only to run off and claim them as his own work. This is no different, albeit much more convoluted and almost as expensive as printer ink.
Sounds about right (Score:2)
It has all been smoke and mirrors so far. Why stop now?
Re:Sounds about right (Score:5, Interesting)
1. [1]It did not happen [nytimes.com]
2. The [2]two [nyu.edu] [3]papers [openai.com] are not similar in their approaches. And the OpenAI one is more innovative and tackles a much harder problem (Buckmaster had only solved Euler).
3. Buckmaster [4]distorted what happened [x.com]. For example, the claim that he asked for Levent to be removed from his own paper the paper because he worked for OpenAI? The context is that one option that OpenAI proposed to Buckmaster was that Tristan could be the lead author on a rewrite of OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes proof . It was in the context of having Tristan rewrite OpenAI's proof to take claim for it that Bubeck said “it would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee” because he felt it would be inappropriate to invite an Anthropic employee to rewrite an OpenAI paper.
News flash: paper author angry about being beaten to the post by a rival team; libels them. Details at 11.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/science/tristan-buckmaster-openai-math-navier-stokes.html
[2] https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/euler.pdf
[3] https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/32d9f210-8b73-45e0-91bc-82a30aef8a9a/navier-stokes.pdf
[4] https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310
Re: (Score:1)
Also...
""I think it's pointless. Like, I think the game is up...."
Buckmaster thinks research is a game, that the knowledge obtained is pointless in itself and that what he engages in is a game for his personal benefit. Sounds more like a sociopath than mathematician.
Re: (Score:2)
> Also...
> ""I think it's pointless. Like, I think the game is up...."
> Buckmaster thinks research is a game, that the knowledge obtained is pointless in itself and that what he engages in is a game for his personal benefit. Sounds more like a sociopath than mathematician.
Plain paper mathematics is not like, for example, physics or sociology. The resources you need for much of it are much smaller and are at the level that it's reasonable for universities to give people just for being good at what they do, not because of the value they give humanity. There's a good history of people doing research entirely for their own pleasure and entertainment and that turning out later to be useful, often contrary to their own explicit wishes (look up the history of matrices). Let's not t
Re: (Score:2)
"The game is up" is a common turn of phrase you aspie idiot. Normal people know exactly what he means.
Re:Sounds about right (Score:4, Insightful)
> It did not happen
I guess you are probably right, however there's a comment on your twitter thread:
> Look in the training data and confirm/deny that Buckmaster's data is or isn't in there. Until you do that, it's very very hard to trust anything OAI says or does.
and until you see that and compare also with his and other mathematicians unpublished work, which might be where the more advanced proof came f you cannot be 100% sure. Their refusal to publish the inputs, including all of the training data they used for this model together with its sources , is a big problem.
Re: (Score:2)
Since they almost certainly obtained those inputs in shady ways, it is no surprise they refuse to publish them though. Also note that any kind of scientific publication has been required for a long, long time to cite all inputs to be regarded as sound. Doing anything else is regarded as serious scientific misconduct and can, for example, get your PhD removed.
Re: Sounds about right (Score:2)
Bear in mind that when you sign up to use GPT you explicitly allow them to use your queries in future training. I mean, I think it would generally be polite for them to have a moratorium on publishing papers based on the work of other peopleâ(TM)s inputs. Without something like that, it becomes useless as a research tool.
Re: (Score:2)
LLMs cannot do original work. No, do not dispute that it. If you do you just prove you have no idea how they work. All they can do (with some probability of error) is to put puzzle pieces together. Yes, that can have impressive results. But everything needs to be already there for the LLM to be able to do it.
Hence the only real question here is where the LLM found the puzzle pieces. Since they have been stealing most of their training data from anything they could get at, it is entirely plausible they stole