Comment Re:Or, counterpoint, it stole somebody else's work (Score 1, Informative) 96
Reading both sides, as well as OpenAI's announcement, it looks like, perhaps unexpectedly, OpenAI is morally right here IMHO. They heard rumours so they put their new model at work on all problems, then focused on two, one is different than those two researchers and the other is a different solution. I think the NYU researcher started too suspicious/paranoid which started the hostility, and the other side, which seemed to have been very accommodating at first lost patience. The Anthropic researcher did not even want to talk to them, I don't see how them saying that it would have been easier if he was not working at Anthropic, like he was proving it himself. In any case this is all silly academic bickering to me. Almost as silly as OpenAI's take that this is the start of AGI somehow...
PS. I have no horse in the race, I use various AI tools to help my work, Claude usually performs better than ChatGPT at the things I do, but I don't root for any company.
How is OpenAI morally right?!?
Best case for OpenAI is that they heard rumours that a researcher was closing in on a NS breakthrough using a specific method, so they instantly set a team on the problem giving them with a massive amount of resources. Their internal team then specifically guided the model to use the same very specific direction the researchers was using, something they (nor the model) would ever have known to do without the rumours. A detail that OpenAI conveniently left out of the narrative.
And that's the best case scenario. The worst case is that because the researcher was using ChatGPT to work on drafts of the paper and those drafts ended up in the training data for the model. So rather than discovering anything the agents just implemented / finished off the work they already had access to.
It's insanely sketchy. The NYU researcher is honestly being extraordinarily calm about the whole thing, typically in a situation like this people would be getting close to a fist fight.