some of the contributors would decline the offer to contribute had they been told that it was sponsored by an AI capabilities company.
This is definitely true. There were ~100 mathematicians working on this (we don’t know how many of them knew) and there’s this.
I interpret you as insinuating that not disclosing that it was a project commissioned by industry was strategic. It might not have been, or maybe to some extent but not as much as one might think.
I’d guess not everyone involved was modeling how the mathematicians would feel. There are multiple (like 20?) people employed at Epoch AI, and multiple people at Epoch AI working on this project. Maybe the person or people communicating to the mathematicians were not in the meetings with OpenAI, or weren’t actively thinking about the details or implications of the agreement, when their job was to recruit people, and in turn the people who thought about the full details also missed communicating to the mathematicians. Or something like that, it’s a possibility, coordination is hard.
I interpret you as insinuating that not disclosing that it was a project commissioned by industry was strategic.
I’m not necessarily implying that they explicitly/deliberately coordinated on this.
Perhaps there was no explicit “don’t mention OpenAI” policy but there was no “person X is responsible for ensuring that mathematicians know about OpenAI’s involvement” policy either.
But given that some of the mathematicians haven’t heard a word about OpenAI’s involvement from the Epoch team, it seems like Epoc at least had a reason not to mention OpenAI’s involvement (though this depends on how extensive communication between the two sides was). Possibly because they were aware of how they might react, both before the project started, as well as in the middle of it.
[ETA: In short, I would have expected this information to reach the mathematicians with high probability, unless the Epoch team had been disinclined to inform the mathematicians.]
Obviously, I’m just speculating here and the non-Epoch mathematicians involved in creation of FrontierMath know better than whatever I might speculate out of this.
This is definitely true. There were ~100 mathematicians working on this (we don’t know how many of them knew) and there’s this.
I interpret you as insinuating that not disclosing that it was a project commissioned by industry was strategic. It might not have been, or maybe to some extent but not as much as one might think.
I’d guess not everyone involved was modeling how the mathematicians would feel. There are multiple (like 20?) people employed at Epoch AI, and multiple people at Epoch AI working on this project. Maybe the person or people communicating to the mathematicians were not in the meetings with OpenAI, or weren’t actively thinking about the details or implications of the agreement, when their job was to recruit people, and in turn the people who thought about the full details also missed communicating to the mathematicians. Or something like that, it’s a possibility, coordination is hard.
I’m not necessarily implying that they explicitly/deliberately coordinated on this.
Perhaps there was no explicit “don’t mention OpenAI” policy but there was no “person X is responsible for ensuring that mathematicians know about OpenAI’s involvement” policy either.
But given that some of the mathematicians haven’t heard a word about OpenAI’s involvement from the Epoch team, it seems like Epoc at least had a reason not to mention OpenAI’s involvement (though this depends on how extensive communication between the two sides was). Possibly because they were aware of how they might react, both before the project started, as well as in the middle of it.
[ETA: In short, I would have expected this information to reach the mathematicians with high probability, unless the Epoch team had been disinclined to inform the mathematicians.]
Obviously, I’m just speculating here and the non-Epoch mathematicians involved in creation of FrontierMath know better than whatever I might speculate out of this.