This is being reported as OpenAI wanting to strip an Anthropic employee of academic credit for the work they did. What the OpenAI person involved is claiming is that they wanted the outside researcher(s) to put their name on OpenAI's work: to headline OpenAI's publication of what they earnestly believed to be an independent result.
If true, that's generous and beyond the level of generosity one should expect. Extending that courtesy (beyond academic norms) to a competitor is expecting too much. It take a result OpenAI spent millions of dollars on, and put "Anthropic Researcher" right on the cover.
This is, of course, taking OpenAI's side of the story at face value. But it is a consistent, coherent, and ethically justifiable series of events, if indeed it happened that way.
> What the OpenAI person involved is claiming is that they wanted the outside researcher(s) to put their name on OpenAI's work
> If true, that's generous and beyond the level of generosity one should expect
"We highly likely stole your work, and threatened you with 'this is bad for your career' and we refuse to acknowledge any work by your collaborator just because he works at a competitor, but we are so so so so generous"
The two proofs are structurally very different, and don’t even prove the same conjecture. It’s becoming very clear that OpenAI did not steal anything here.
If it was "very clear", OpenAI wouldn't be threatening the researcher with "it's very bad for your career" or state "we can't tell you if it was trained on user input".
Additionally, according to the researcher, OpenAI's proof follows the same approach they used, and which was largely unused in academia, but OpenAI claimes they arrived at it immediately.
If true, that's generous and beyond the level of generosity one should expect. Extending that courtesy (beyond academic norms) to a competitor is expecting too much. It take a result OpenAI spent millions of dollars on, and put "Anthropic Researcher" right on the cover.
This is, of course, taking OpenAI's side of the story at face value. But it is a consistent, coherent, and ethically justifiable series of events, if indeed it happened that way.