Trying to collect personal info might not be the motivation but it's not at all a crackpot theory. And what's the conspiracy aspect of calling a big company a liar?
Your dismissal is so much weaker than the post you're replying to.
>And what's the conspiracy aspect of calling a big company a liar?
the conspiracy aspect is alleging a conspiracy without providing any evidence, which is apparently how 90% of people function now. Calling someone a liar because you invented a conversation in your head isn't entirely sane
“ On Tuesday, September 1, we heard rumors that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved. Inspired by these rumors and by the step change in performance of our internal model, we launched an effort to evaluate it on all open Millennium Prize problems and a few other high-impact problems.”
They do not explicitly admit to knowing about NS specifically, but are extremely explicit that they tried to scoop some potential millennium prize winners.
So then they DIDN'T "learn the secret to cracking the problem". They simply knew that part of the problem was solved. Knowing a problem can be solved and knowing the solution are not the same thing.
The claim that OpenAI somehow used the mathematicians' ideas to leapfrog them seems unsupported at this time and IMHO it was irresponsible to bring it up because credulous people will immediately believe that narrative.
And from my perspective, if some math folks typing in a few questions to OpenAI provides sufficient training data for OpenAI to solve a big problem... that's amazing! A few conversations/prompts out of the billions that OpenAI trains on lead to this result- that means there is an awful lot of low-hanging fruit that could be exploited cheaply.
I'm curious how many other 300 billion output tokens OpenAI has "paid for" that have resulted in no breakthroughs.
Either they had a pretty good idea that investing this type of money in that compute on a model in training would lead to these specific results, or they gambled with other people's money.
I want to hear about the gambles and expenditures they don't brag about. In America's energy economy, there's finite resources to expend.
The (unprovable, yes, without OpenAI being willingly transparent) argument is that openAI constructed a prompt to scoop them using some inside knowledge about the approach, which they allude to in the announcement.
In the transcripts, Brubeck is very cagey and evasive about the prompt, when it was supplied, and its contents.
> learning the answer might be in model X’s training data made them believe that model X specifically might be able to solve the question, and they were able to very quickly find enough certainty about the former to commit millions of dollars to the latter.
They don’t need to know, because their IP stealing machine knows for them. They just have to buy enough compute, and someone else’s work is theirs.
I said “very quickly find enough certainty” to suggest hypothetical situations like “someone searches the conversation logs, confirms for themselves the solution is present, then shares the confidence gained from this knowledge without explicitly sharing the knowledge itself”. That person could recuse themselves from the project so the project can still legally make claims like “conversation data was not used” in the announcement, while also knowing that they are guaranteed to get there if they just pull the lever enough.
(Naturally, I have far too much respect for OpenAI’s legal team to suggest this is what happened in their project.)
1. The researches didn't actually have the breakthroughs. In the Navier-Stokes case they didn't solve the full problem, in this case too they didn't actually have the solution, they were experimenting with the methods.
2. Different OpenAI employees have come to out to say the only reason they can't definitively say no is that for privacy reasons they can't go see whether they actually did get any data out of a given user.
3. In any case, nobody at any point has suggested that opted-out user data was used for training. The author of the new tweet explicitly said they only opted out in late June, which is well after any RL on Sol would've ended (AFAICT OpenAI used 5.6 sol for those solutions)
> in this case too they didn't actually have the solution
Given the size and recall of the biggest models, it's not unreasonable to assume that a single pertinent conversation would make it into the training data.
I would almost expect training to overweight conversations with novel scientific and mathematical implications.
> the only reason they can't definitively say no is that for privacy reasons
They could 100% definitely say no, if they know they did not train on user data. The "we can't definitely say no" is practically a "yes" if they trained on user data.
Additionally, the behavior of OpenAI here has been quite poor as well. They immediately started racing to a solution after one researcher enquired about whether they are training on their conversations.
> that opted-out user data was used for training
Even if not opted out, it is still absolutely theft and extremely poor behavior in the academic sense. If you show someone your WIP unpublished research, that does not mean they can take that exact research and beat you to the punch, all while intentionally not crediting you.
You quoted the OP saying "in this case too they didn't actually have the solution" and responded with the totally unrelated, "Given the size and recall of the biggest models, it's not unreasonable to assume that a single pertinent conversation would make it into the training data."
Neither of the researchers insinuating that their ideas were trained on had the actual solutions. This means the model could not have "stolen" the final solution from their data. At most, it could have built upon their work in the same it builds upon any other training data, though that is also questionable speculation.
>They could 100% definitely say no, if they know they did not train on user data.
No one anywhere has claimed that "OpenAI does not train on user data." OpenAI has always said that it trains on user data.
>They immediately started racing to a solution after one researcher enquired about whether they are training on their conversations.
They started racing towards a solution after they heard (incorrectly) that Anthropic had a solution; I agree this is poor sport but the "after one researcher enquired about whether they are training on their conversations" claim is false. The enquiry happened after OpenAI had obtained the solution.
If the mathematicians are using ChatGPT, then they themselves are benefiting from the work of other ChatGPT users, so ChatGPT using their work is not wrong!
> and the thing that is continuing to scale well or pretty well is inference
No, the models are just more intelligent. GPT 5.6 Sol can do more in fewer output tokens than any model from late 2025. Test-time compute isn't the only lever the labs have for scaling. This is among the two major things Ed has gotten laughably wrong in his technical predictions (that TTC was the last resort to make models better, and that synthetic data wouldn't help)
> Ed Zitron doesn't say that AI doesn't work, that its impact on the world will not increase
He's said variants of both of these things before! That's the point OP makes too, people say "He doesn't say that" or "But what about this" when he's said a million, sometimes contradictory things.
I’d be interested in a real accounting of what he said, rather than what people say they’ve heard.
If he says AI is changing work in some places but not-at-all in most… that’s defensible. Or at least we can look at that. Did he say it about the llm offerings from one or two providers or about (broad gesture) all AI efforts, everywhere? Etc.
Certainly it’s changing sw development work. It’s less clear, most everywhere else.
- LLM’s potential and capability are dramatically overstated
- Business leaders are either driven by the Emperor’s New Clothes effect, or the legitimate fear of stock price or valuation drops, to admit it.
- The amount of money being dumped into this industry will never pay off.
He’s snide and condescending, to the detriment of his message. I can completely understand why people aren’t interested in listening to him. However, straw-manning his stances by oversimplifying or flat-out making uninformed assumptions about them isn’t a useful response to what he’s saying.
Frankly, this industry squirts out enough bullshit to smother an active volcano every single day. If you think Ed isn’t credible, I sure hope you dismiss the industry leaders just as readily.
> No, the cornerstones of his thesis are: [...] The amount of money being dumped into this industry will never pay off.
That has only been a cornerstone of his thesis for the last 10 months or so, once Claude Code and Codex began making gobs of revenue. Before that the cornerstone of his thesis was "nobody will ever pay for AI" and then he silently pivoted, without acknowledging any error, once it was clear that was not true.
This is what bugs people about Zitron and why people aren't listening to him. He's has repeatedly been proven wrong, and every time it happens he just silently moves the goalposts and never admits any mistakes. It's fine-- actually, correct-- to write someone off once it's clear that every time they get disproven they'll just move to a new thesis instead of reflecting on what went wrong and what assumptions might be fundamentally incorrect about their thinking.
In less than 3 years we’ve completely redefined how we interact with computers, and Zitron’s saying that there’s no way that investment in that pays off. He moves the goalposts every time something new proves him wrong.
To me, that’s not only not a credible stance, it’s immensely stupid.
The only way anyone could logically take that stance in the face of all the evidence otherwise is if their entire livelihood depended on it.
if you amass 115k subscribers by basically being wrong along the way just about everything and the shift as to "not remain static" and then continue to be full of shit, that is one thing - another things is going from "hm, what a great toy this is" to "holy shit, I can take on 4 contracts at the same time and run 25 terminals of CC is parallel" :)
Zitron’s superpower is to get reasonable people like you to turn his bullshit into prose.
He’s a scam artist. So is Altman. The correct answer is to not listen to either one, at least not on a regular basis and certainly not as a source of truth.
> straw-manning his stances by oversimplifying
He literally lies about numbers. The spreadsheet errors the article describes are either gross negligence or simple evidence of lying.
Are there sources for this? I'm seeing an 11% increase in revenue from their 2025 Q4 report[0], and still a 1% increase in their 2026 Q1 report[1], the off-season for the videogame industry. Hardware revenue's falling, but it's propped up with their Game Pass and game sales.
Note that I said "YoY", and the numbers you're citing are quarter to quarter (and on 2025 Q4 don't include the Xbox Hardware division, only their content division).
The points I've quoted come from the article, not the interview with the developer. I didn't go that far down because clearly the person taking the interview doesn't know what they're talking about.
The tweet is from Asha Sharma, the leader of Xbox!
> It's also only referencing hardware sales. Not the Xbox division.
No??? You can quibble about the article, but you must've failed to read:
> The fourth quarter alone showed a sharper split. Xbox content and services revenue, which includes Game Pass, fell 10 percent in the quarter. Hardware revenue dropped 13 percent over the same three months
This is further bolstered by MS's own press release:
> and on 2025 Q4 don't include the Xbox Hardware division, only their content division
You said "I'm seeing an 11% increase in revenue from their 2025 Q4 report"
When the report says:
> Xbox content and services revenue increased 13% (up 12% in constant currency)
In fact, there's no 11% figure anywhere in the report, so I have to assume this is what you're referring to since MS didn't break out Xbox hardware anywhere in it.
This is laughably shoddy work, please don't waste my time.
Yes, I know the tweet was from Asha Sharma. The crypto site referenced throughout the site null and voided my ability to take much of it seriously. At the end of the day, videogames _are_ profitable for these shareholders, granted that as many "unnecessary" studios are closed / employees laid off, risky creative endeavors are shuttered, and subscription services + legal gambling for children are at the forefront. I don't think you know anything about the videogame industry, and certainly not as much as a developer working on a successful indie game for two decades now whom you thought was simply a game journalist.
Xi has made it official policy, see his keynote speech at their World AI Conference last month:
> We should seize this rare, historic opportunity to encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing. [1]
People have pointed that this seemingly made Alibaba/Qwen turn around from closing their models (this was rumored after the shakeup early this year [2]) and release the weights for even the Max variant of their new models, which they previously did not.
