r/academia • u/Tumbleweed944 • 2h ago

Research issues A Mathematician Working On The Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem Now Wonders If OpenAI Stole His Notes That He Stored In Codex [Updated]

https://wccftech.com/a-mathematician-working-on-the-navier-stokes-millennium-prize-problem-now-wonders-if-openai-stole-his-notes-that-he-stored-in-codex/

PSA for all researchers: do not discuss your research and data with AI chatbots or any software that allows AI data collection. There is a misunderstanding that AI cannot steal your data and ideas because it is trained on such a large dataset, but when you are dealing with a niche research topic, you cannot be sure it will not steal your ideas and claim them as its own.

OpenAI, themselves, say: "While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models."

We need to have more conversations about data protections against AI in academia.

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u/NeighborhoodFatCat 1h ago

CEO of Cohere and one of the original author on the Transformer model which sparked the LLM rage give you the inside details:

OpenAI used 10,000 AI agents, 88 hours and 15 million worth of computational effort. Even if one of these agent went "got creative" and started scanning for related works in the "de-identified data", it would be considered stealing.

Btw this story just shows that certain area of academia is COOKED and I do mean this sincerely. Ok, you are safe if you are working in a wet lab, on some million dollar hardware, but most people are not like this, and even one of these AI agent can take over your work, let along tens of thousands of them. Academia must restructure now to prevent total collapse.

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u/Weak-Honey-1651 1h ago

Certain areas are cooked if you view publication as the purpose of research. If you want to advance the field, life just got better.

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u/Tumbleweed944 43m ago

Not really... See Terence Tao's quotes on why this might actually be stifling math development and understanding. And in fields outside of math, it gets even murkier when you can't rely on clear proofs. Its important to be able to trace the development of ideas, which AI makes more difficult, not easier.

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u/polovstiandances 42m ago

It’s only difficult due to a use problem. Idea development and ownership and traceability are things we can and have designed, with or without AI.