Chuck

this is becoming exactly the nightmare scenario for ai safety. the second ai safety becomes attached to politicians and political tribes, half the country is going to oppose it simply because the other half supports it. democrats start lining up behind slowing down. trump declares the whole thing a hoax and promises america won’t stop. i absolutely fucking hate watching this become partisan.

tristan buckmaster just published a statement that is, if accurate, one of the ugliest things i’ve read out of a frontier lab. not because of the math. because of what happened after openai found out two people were about to beat them to the punch. buckmaster and levent alpöge spent a year pushing the córdoba / martínez-zoroa program to smooth forcing. august 15 they got blowup for boussinesq and 3d euler. lean-verified august 22. they were paying openai out of pocket and dumping every draft into private codex sessions. the program is obscure. almost nobody else was on it. this was not “paste the clay problem into a chatbot.” then this: > thursday sept 3, buckmaster emails openai privately. rumors are flying. he is trying to stop a mess, not start one. > they reply the same day: give us details so we can “avoid competing.” also, want free compute? > sunday they suddenly need a call “at any point today.” sebastien bubeck gets on. levent is not invited. > openai says an internal model has a ~100-page proof of forced navier–stokes blowup. fefferman options c and d. the exact route buckmaster and alpöge had quietly chosen. > they show him a prompt and claim the model was “simply given the problem statement.” levent is told “very little human input.” > that falls apart on the same call. a whole team had been on it. they started on the unforced problem, warmed the model up on easier equations including euler, and even the prompt they showed him was written by prompting codex. > he asks when the first prompt went out. they stall. then agree: the past few days. after information about his work reached openai. > he asks whether the model was trained on, or had access to, the private codex sessions where they put every draft of this project. > answer: the model does not look up user data. > he asks again. about training. > no answer. then it stops being a science story and becomes an hr story. > offer 1: you post euler. we post navier–stokes the next day. > offer 2: after you post euler, you alone write the navier–stokes paper, credit our model, and we cut levent. > bubeck says twice he wants levent removed from authorship because he works at anthropic. he declines both. he says if they release it that way, he goes public. the reply is not a scientific objection. > “why would you ruin your career?” > “if you don’t want me to be nice, then i don’t have to be nice.” later, a text to levent proposing a one-on-one: > “i don’t know if tristan is being fully rational right now.” that is not how you treat a collaborator. that is how you split one. openai got word two researchers were closing a path almost nobody else was on. they spun up a team on that exact path. they would not answer whether the researchers’ unpublished drafts in openai’s product were used. they tried to dictate the announcement order. they tried to remove a coauthor because he works at a competitor. when that failed, someone reached for a career threat. this is a lab finding out academics were about to publish, sprinting the same narrow program, refusing the data question, and trying to manage credit around a rival affiliation. really slimy if even half of this holds. what the fuck is happening.