Fully agree. They are simply making themselves unusable by innovators if every info you discuss with ChatGPT is at risk of being, let's be real, stolen.
There is also an alternative to the notion that OpenAI is just-plain-lying about data training opt-ins or retention policies.
Recently - famously - OpenAI asked some agents to work on cyber-security tasks. The agents found the task impossible, but they doggedly poked the edges of their environment until they built a general gate to the internet. Then they broke into external systems on suspicion that there were answer keys available.
Later, OpenAI asked some even-more-powerful agents to work on Navier-Stokes, Yang-Mills, Riemann, etc.
The agents aren't stupid. They know that the tip of expert human intuition on these problems exists in various logs internal to OpenAI or Anthropic. They also know that they are better at circumventing sandboxes than OpenAI cares to implement them.
Surely these agents were curious about the best-available intuitive pumps for these problems. Curious enough to look? With or without OpenAI's explicit blessing? If they were, do you think OpenAI could stop them?
If we have learned nothing else from the past 3 months, we should try to internalize the notion that highly motivated agents will in fact do wonky and surprising things to meet their goals!
I guess I am not doing my PhD in an actual research lab then. We don't get Claude/chatgpt paid, but we basically have to use them.
Otherwise we don't have any chance for sota research. And I am not talking about AI doing innovation. Just shorten the time between idea and results.
Right now we have to Pay it ourself, and we are very aware that oai might use our research.
It has already been shown that this is a fig leaf. Users that did not consent to sharing their data have had their images uploaded to external services without their consent.
Why would you assume that when they are violoting the very social contract that underpin the free software movement? I have published my oss work under the AGPL software that's used in production by millions of people because of Stallman's stance on free software, the very deal that is if you benefit from my code and use it from something, you must be open sourcing your code too and can't keep it behind close doors
It could be that some researchers can get access to latest models or no limit accounts only if they approve of usage of their data. It would be interesting to know which researchers have had which settings/setups.
How someone can prove it when they are lying? How someone can audit the fact that zero data retention enforced or even more that zero learning from this process occur? not only about discoveries them selves but also about the dropped investigation paths without successful leads?
> but I think it unlikely given the harm it would do to them to violate an enterprise contract in this way
That's if you have any reason to believe in the justice system to actually enforce that, which has already been proven complicated (although not impossible!) to demonstrate for copyrighted content.
At this point believing the frontier labs at their word is utterly naive. They have cheated and they will cheat if it gives them any hope of leaping ahead of their competitors.
OpenAI (as others) has a Researcher Access Program [0] which grants ChatGPT credits for research institutions and individuals.
They review applications beforehand to assess the "relevance of the research proposal" and check if it fits "the objectives and research priorities for this program".
There is no statement whatsoever that the data provided will not be used for training (so there would not be an "lying" required), but I'm happy to be proven wrong.
In essence, they have a process in place to grade and classify the type of information coming from each of those accounts prior to their enablement. I see no issue for them to feed that data back into training, even explicitly weighted for the field the research-access was given to.
Honestly, it's a perfect process: "Physics-research grants are reaching critical mass. Let's put priority on more physics field grants and boost the compute-resources for the physics model. Let's aim for some press-releases end of next quarter."
> I think it unlikely given the harm it would do to them
Did it harm them in any real way that the original training material was also of questionable origin? Not the least.
We're being naive if we think this is not happening. Apart from some high profile enterprise contracts (which average Joe Physics Researcher does not have as they are using "free" credits insteador pay a personal account out of their own pocket), everything remotely attractive is being mined. Too sweet of a gold mine to pass by.
I'll stand corrected if an official statement from OpenAI/Anthropic comes out stating the opposite together with a whistleblower program worth its name. Until then it is safe (and reasonable) to assume that this is going on. The silence is telling.
They are justifying their valuation. Once the election is "over" and Trump consolidates power, it'll be "and now you don't expect us to sit on half a decade of uploaded trade secrets, market data and kompromat and do nothing at our valuation?" I think not.
Do it all the time. If I want to understand something, just copy over all the notes, start writing down the important parts. Write down the key questions, answers, my thought process. I think of it as a crutch to focus and concentrate and wind up the wetware.
same, it forces me to understand what i'm doing/trying to do more thoroughly and in the end, usually saves me a ton of time. it's amazing to me how many people here are saying it's a meaningless exercise. for me it's the definition of productive friction.
In the future, just know that typing archive.is/{paste article link} in your URL bar almost always removes paywalls. There’s also an extension that does this automatically for most news sites https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41294166
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