A mathematician asks whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished work

More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

Mathematician Andreas Thom shared an email exchange with OpenAI's Mark Sellke, questioning transparency around unpublished math. Thom had asked whether his ChatGPT conversations entered training data or were accessible during reasoning. Sellke replied 'that did not happen,' which Thom now reads as addressing only direct access while dodging the training data question. OpenAI later said in the Buckmaster-Alpöge case it 'cannot rule out that de-identified data helped improve our models.' Thom opted out of data sharing on June 29, but the post doesn't say whether OpenAI responded to that.

Why it matters: Mathematician Andreas Thom published email records alleging that OpenAI researcher Mark Sellke deliberately answered only the inference-access half of a question about unpublished math work entering training data, sidestepping the training-data half. This hits a core trust iss...