Thom's account on an exchange with OpenAI regarding non-sofic groups

Skip to main contentHotkey 1 Skip to main navigationHotkey 2 Recent searches No recent searches Search options Only available when logged in. mathstodon.xyz is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse. A Mastodon instance for maths people. We have LaTeX rendering in the web interface! Administered by: Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp Server stats: 4.9K active users mathstodon.xyz: About mathstodon.xyz Status Profiles directory Privacy policy Mastodon: About Mastodon Get the app Keyboard shortcuts View source code v4.7.1 Back tristanbuckmaster @tristanbuckmaster@mastodon.social2d Today, Levent Alpöge and I have made public three results: finite-time blowup with smooth forcing for incompressible porous media, for Boussinesq, and for 3d incompressible Euler. https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/stateme nt.pdf https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/euler.p df https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/ipm.pdf https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/boussin esq.pdf https://github.com/tristanbuckmaster/f luid lean 15 Andreas Thom @andreasthom@mathstodon.xyz @tristanbuckmaster 1/3 I want to record a number of points that I realized after reading up on the controversy. In fact it recalls an exchange I had with OpenAI after its non-sofic-group announcement. It exposes a serious, unanswered question about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished mathematics.

I wrote in an email to Mark Sellke and Sebastien Bubeck shortly after the surprising finding of a non-sofic group using the methods of Kun and myself: “Another point is that I and a colleague in Dresden were discussing the expander matching problem and various extensions of the work with Gabor Kun actively over the last months with ChatGPT, so that we are of course curious if that was part of the training data or accessible to the reasoning process. There is a certain (frankly unacceptable) lack of transparency here; and I fear it will damage the communal process of math more than the new AI-generated results will benefit the subject.” Mark Sellke’s complete answer was: “Regarding your conversations with ChatGPT: that did not happen.” I had explicitly asked about two different things: (1) whether our conversations entered training data, and (2) whether they were accessible to the solving process. The categorical answer now looks as though it addressed only direct access under (2).