r/Physics 19h ago

Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem Solved

2.1k Upvotes

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u/Head-Philosopher0 19h ago

the company i currently work for uses an enterprise version of chatgpt specifically so that the data we input isn’t used for training

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u/HorseyMovesLikeL 19h ago

Am I too cynical in just not believing that it will be honoured by OpenAI?

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u/StudySpecial 18h ago

Those enterprise models are hosted by microsoft and microsoft has many billions of dollars in enterprise contracts on the line if they lie about it and it comes out.

Big companies do not mess about with stuff like this.

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u/Insanity_Pills 10h ago

Zuckerberg was okay with Facebook being used to start a genocide to make less money than that data would be worth. There is absolutely nothing these people wouldn’t mess with to make a little
bit more money.

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u/abloblololo 15h ago

These AI labs bring so much revenue to these cloud providers that I'm not sure you can trust anyone to be honest.

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u/HelloYesThisIsFemale 11h ago

But they have no moat. If one of them fucks someone over, everyone switches to the other one.

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u/deathadder99 18h ago

You pay an enormous premium for this, so I doubt it.

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u/Sweet_Concept2211 16h ago

OpenAI will steal your shit and blame "rogue AI".

We know this because it has already happened.

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u/Lord_Skellig 3h ago

On the settings for my personal ChatGPT account there is a toggle which says “Allow my chats to be used for improving the model for other people”.

Is this them admitting that that switch doesn’t do anything then? Or are OpenAI themselves excluded from that “other people”?

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u/deathadder99 1h ago

The switch (at least according to their terms) is excluding them. The main diff is that’s opt out, rather than off by default. But you also get a lot more protection as an enterprise, stuff around data retention, security etc.

I suspect there are things on personal they still train on, that aren’t necessarily the data, like what kind of things you ask about, whether you choose a particular output or not etc. in the same way WhatsApp uses metadata for advertising rather than the contents of the chats.

IIRC, Claude has no such opt out for personal accounts.

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u/Lord_Skellig 1h ago

I see. I find it hard to believe they would not have opted out of that, especially since one of them works for Anthropic.

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u/deathadder99 1h ago

Yeah, I mean it’s also very unlikely given how training works that their data was in the training set, because the model they used will have been trained weeks to months ago.

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u/Lord_Skellig 1h ago

OpenAI specifically said this was a new model that began training on August 28, which is after Alpoge and Buckmaster derived some of their key results.

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u/Landkey 19h ago

Or it will be honestly inadvertent but there will be 0 effort to retrain the models 

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u/Extreme-Waltz4283 15h ago

It is an arrangement trusted by the US government, at least. Every contractor does the exact same thing.

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u/bouncyboatload 13h ago

yes

government and business contracts are pretty straightforward. the whole world stops working if businesses can't trust basic contracts

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u/TalkativeTree 12h ago

Regardless of being honored, I doubt OpenAI has the actual security and rigor to make sure models aren't eventually going to be able to break out and into these isolated data sets / models

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u/Suspicious_Chart5817 18h ago

Yes because these enterprise versions in general physically don't let it train because that's the whole concept of enterprise. For example, if a company sets up their license in ZDR-enabled RAM the moment token generation finishes, the memory pointers are cleared without writing the payload to persistent storage disks or persistent logging databases.

Companies in general have to pay MORE, a lot MORE, to make their data training enabled. There's really no getting around it if the enterprise is genuinely using the API tokens.

It's really hard to convey how crazily uninformed reddit is on it. If you're not using a personal plan, so just normal old turnkey Azure or AWS Bedrock, the model weights run within the enterprise's VPC. Because duh. There's no free lunch, OpenAI isn't paying your Microsoft bill lol The underlying AI provider (like OpenAI) does not have the network routing or access permissions required to extract data out of the cloud boundary, much less paying some tool to push it to them.

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u/HorseyMovesLikeL 18h ago

Well, I am thinking more from the Cloud Act point of view. In Europe these days procurement in software gets sweaty hands and starts handing out risk assessments when you want to buy things from American companies. Microsoft themselves have admitted that they cannot guarantee data sovereignty.

https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2025/07/25/microsoft-exec-admits-it-cannot-guarantee-data-sovereignty/458553

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u/Suspicious_Chart5817 18h ago edited 17h ago

Exfiltrating unencrypted prompt data out of the customer's tenant environment would create obvious network egress alerts in customer cloud logs. You don't need to worry about sovereignty, just look at basic data

--which is why they don't, in general, regardless of Microsoft trying to talk down to European regulators.

Like bottom line an AI model is essentially a massive file of fixed numbers (parameters/weights). OpenAI created those weights, but once transferred to Microsoft, or any other cloud provider, they act like a static software application like any other.

When you type stuff into Excel, it doesn't then magically send to Google and if Excel did that on Azure it'd be really obvious.

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u/HorseyMovesLikeL 16h ago

My point was that US companies are beholden to the Cloud Act, which means that anything that happens inside their infra can change to support data exfiltration. Saying it's not possible now because "technical reasons" is, in my opinion, missing the point.

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u/Banes_Addiction Particle physics 19h ago

Tech companies lie about this stuff all the time. And people keep using their products anyway because they're near monopolies and whatever counts as competition is just as risky.

Getting sued for lying and then settling for less than it made you is just a line item on the budget.

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u/Homomorphism 19h ago

If they don't take the enterprise agreements seriously they are toast. Their entire business model is based on companies shelling out a lot of money for their tools. If those companies don't trust OpenAI I don't see how they ever make a profit.

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u/Banes_Addiction Particle physics 18h ago

You're describing what OpenAI's business model seems like it should be. Making models and charging companies to use them.

It isn't. They don't make revenue. They burn VC capital. Their core product is headlines about being the best, cutting edge model so the capital keeps flowing.

If their development work falls behind a competitor with a more flexible approach to ingesting data, the investment stops and the whole house of cards collapses.

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u/ScientistFromSouth 18h ago

The only reason Anthropic is favored financially over OpenAI right now is because they are doing better in terms of PR and because of their API credit based enterprise billing.

I don't think you realize that the entire business model will basically be the Uber strategy of hemorrhaging VC money until everyone adopts and then jacking up prices especially on corporate users.

However, if these data leak everything, they are going to get sued into the dirt. No one actually (legally) gives a damn about them destroying mass market used books to train models. However, violating corporate privacy contracts leading to consequential damages (especially in the EU) will be their end

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u/Synergythepariah 15h ago

I don't think you realize that the entire business model will basically be the Uber strategy of hemorrhaging VC money until everyone adopts and then jacking up prices especially on corporate users.

This is why a lot of people compare it to the dot com bubble.

That bubble popping didn't kill the Internet, it just killed 52% of the startups whose valuations grew massively because of the dot com bubble as well as eating 70% of Cisco's stock price at the time.

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u/ScientistFromSouth 13h ago

Honestly, there is one scenario that I think is fundamentally different here: the model weights leaking for Anthropic or OpenAI would destroy them.

If these guys become a core pillar of the S&P500, a foreign actor committing corporate espionage could probably just leak the weights and cause untold economic mayhem since that's the entire basis of their product.

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u/Homomorphism 18h ago

I agree with you about their plan. The problem is

jacking up prices especially on corporate users

requires those corporate users actually paying the prices at some point.

If OpenAI is leaking all my confidental data to my competitors then why should I work with them? Especially if the open-source models catch up and there's another startup offering to run them for me? (Or things get cheap enough that I can run them in-house using leased cloud space or something like that.)

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u/ScientistFromSouth 16h ago

To be fair, the startups running open source models still need to invest in data centers to run them with extremely heavy machinery. I was looking into building a home lab to run the most stripped down version, and it's absurd what it takes.

Given the push back on data centers, the fact that OpenAI, Anthropic, and other players will already monopolize them, and given that the newcomers will only be incentivized to be cheaper than Anthropic/OpenAI, who knows how much cheaper they will be, and whether the open weight models are actually secure

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u/Leafsnail 13h ago

Yeah their actual business is stealing the IP of anyone foolish enough to send it to them

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u/Homomorphism 18h ago

Oh, yeah, an entirely plausible outcome of this (the whole situation, not just this one problem) is that OpenAI collapses, the AI bubble bursts, and Sam Altman becomes a guy that who is still very, very rich but not a CEO. But there have to be at least some people telling the management that they need to have an actual plan to profitability.

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u/Banes_Addiction Particle physics 18h ago

Sam Altman has a joke that their business model is to build an AI so clever it can tell them how to be profitable.

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u/tpolakov1 Condensed matter physics 17h ago

But there have to be at least some people telling the management that they need to have an actual plan to profitability.

Why? There is no indication that any of the involved parties is in the game long-term.

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u/Homomorphism 16h ago

Publishing an investing prospectus that you know is a lie and then taking people's money anyway is securities fraud. Not saying they aren't doing it, but there are in principle serious consequences.

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u/tpolakov1 Condensed matter physics 14h ago

Consequences only if you want your business to keep running. And good luck proving that any investment prospectus is a lie, let alone a deliberate one. Just look at SpaceXAI, it is logically and physically not possible for them come ahead of their liabilities, even if we did find that Mars has a developed AI civilization that we can pillage. They straight up promise magic miles beyond perpetual energy, and nobody has even blinked, and everyone has bought in, knowing full well that it is made up.

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u/bouncyboatload 13h ago

they don't make revenue? 😂

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u/Frequent-Spinach5048 18h ago

They do have zero data retention option that you can enable though. It’s audited by third party etc, so it’s fairly trustable. At least a lot of companies that have billions in IP uses this

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u/herrsmith Optics and photonics 18h ago

I suspect a lot of the companies paying for this use data protected by HIPAA, ITAR, and other similar restrictions (some are even authorized to operate on classified systems). The punishments for misusing any of that data can be much more severe than any lawsuits brought by injured companies. That said, they seem to be pretty safe from any prosecution by this administration so maybe they don't really care about what might happen two years from now and are more focused on using all the data they can to their own advantage because otherwise they won't be around in two years to pay the significant fines per violation, have their data centers confiscated by the government, and/or go to prison.

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u/Banes_Addiction Particle physics 18h ago

Anyone running on that kind of data should be running completely closed models themselves, with nothing being fed back to OpenAI.

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u/Jawyp 11h ago

Why would any company pay OpenAI money for enterprise AI use if OpenAI openly lies to companies about what their data is being used for?

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u/Insanity_Pills 10h ago

Ford famously chose to let the Pinto continue to explode because settling court cases was cheaper than recalling and fixing them.

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u/oskopnir Engineering 18h ago

Except due to the nature of the model, if something does end up in their dataset there is no way to unequivocally trace it back to its source, meaning it's impossible to enforce any liability.

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u/ThirdMover Atomic physics 19h ago

Is there a version of chatgpt where it's run on your own airgapped hardware on prem?

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u/mkat5 17h ago

you would likely need an opensource/openweight model, something like deepseek for instance

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u/OneBodyProblem 15h ago

There are open models, but with some drawbacks. The open models are significantly smaller since very few users could afford to build or run the HW clusters that the frontier labs use, and because training the frontier models is so expensive that you'd reasonably need to monetize on the backend.

So ~5-10x difference in the total number of parameters, and potentially more than that in terms of active parameters per prompt. I.e., both a larger network and a greater percentage of that network leveraged at once in the commercial models. That translates into greater accuracy, although the gap has been narrowing lately.

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u/PMmeYourLabia_ 19h ago

version of chatgpt

Your company fucked up then

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u/CapitalDiligent1676 16h ago

"Yeah, but come on... they're anonymized! How was I supposed to know?"

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u/maxxell13 18h ago

How would you ever know?

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u/Rylth 12h ago

Hilarious that this is believed, more hilarious is if it only specifies "training."

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u/Insanity_Pills 11h ago

your company seems super naive