Reposting from LessWrong, for people who might be less active there:[1]
TL;DR
* FrontierMath was funded by OpenAI[2]
* This was not publicly disclosed until December 20th, the date of OpenAI's o3 announcement, including in earlier versions of the arXiv paper where this was eventually made public.
* There was allegedly no active communication about this funding to the mathematicians contributing to the project before December 20th, due to the NDAs Epoch signed, but also no communication after the 20th, once the NDAs had expired.
* OP claims that "I have heard second-hand that OpenAI does have access to exercises and answers and that they use them for validation. I am not aware of an agreement between Epoch AI and OpenAI that prohibits using this dataset for training if they wanted to, and have slight evidence against such an agreement existing."
Tamay's response:
* Seems to have confirmed the OpenAI funding + NDA restrictions
* Claims OpenAI has "access to a large fraction of FrontierMath problems and solutions, with the exception of a unseen-by-OpenAI hold-out set that enables us to independently verify model capabilities."
* They also have "a verbal agreement that these materials will not be used in model training."
Edit: Elliot (the project lead) points out that the holdout set does not yet exist (emphasis added):Â
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Some quick uncertainties I had:
* What does this mean for OpenAI's 25% score on the benchmark?
* What steps did Epoch take or consider taking to improve transparency between the time they were offered the NDA and the time of signing the NDA?
* What is Epoch's level of confidence that OpenAI will keep to their verbal agreement to not use these materials in model training, both in some technically true sense, and in a broader interpretation of an agreement? (see e.g. bottom paragraph of Ozzi's comment).
1. ^
Epistemic status: quickly summarised + liberally copy pasted with ~0 additional fact checking given Tama
It seems that part of the reason communism is so widely discredited is the clear contrast between neighboring countries that pursued more free-market policies. This makes me wonderâ practicality aside, what would happen if effective altruists concentrated all their global health and development efforts into a single country, using  similar neighboring countries as the comparison group?
Given that EA-driven philanthropy accounts for only about 0.02% of total global aid, perhaps the influence EA's approach could have by definitively proving its impact would be greater than trying to maximise the good it does directly.
A minor personal gripe I have with EA is that it seems like the vast majority of the resources are geared towards what could be called young elites, particularly highly successful people from top universities like Harvard and Oxford.
For instance, opportunities listed on places like 80,000 Hours are generally the kind of jobs that such people are qualified for, i.e. AI policy at RAND, or AI safety researcher at Anthropic, or something similar that I suspect less than the top 0.001% of human beings would be remotely relevant for.
Someone like myself, who graduated from less prestigious schools, or who struggles in small ways to be as high functioning and successful, can feel like we're not competent enough to be useful to the cause areas we care about.
I personally have been rejected in the past from both 80,000 Hours career advising, and the Long-Term Future Fund. I know these things are very competitive of course. I don't blame them for it. On paper, my potential and proposed project probably weren't remarkable. The time and money should go to the those who are most likely to make a good impact. I understand this.
It just, I guess I just feel like I don't know where I should fit into the EA community. Even just many people on the forum seem incredibly intelligent, thoughtful, kind, and talented. The people at the EA Global I atttended in 2022 were clearly brilliant. In comparison, I just feel inadequate. I wonder if others who don't consider themselves exceptional also find themselves intellectually intimidated by the people here.
We do probably need the best of the best to be involved first and foremost, but I think we also need the average, seemingly unremarkable EA sympathetic person to be engaged in some way if we really want to be more than a small community, to be as impactful as possible. Though, maybe I'm just biased to believe that mass movements are historically what led to progress. Maybe a small group of elites leading the charge is actually what i
EAG Bay Area Application Deadline extended to Feb 9th â apply now!
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