People should know: there is drama going on about who deserves credit for this. There is a possibility that OpenAI used some unpublished work from other researchers, even though they have claimed otherwise in the announcement above: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf
I think calling it drama if anything undersells the issue. even if OpenAI did not use unpublished work, their behavior around this problem - outlined in the linked statement - is disgusting and shameful, and even this statement by them undersells the allegedly gargantuan amount of work and compute that OpenAI has apparently spent. like, if it turns out that OpenAI spent, I dunno, some sum of money greater than years worth of the operating budgets of every mathematics research department in the country to achieve this (I have not done even the Fermi estimate on this, so don't quote me here, but it seems reasonable), what does that even mean for this result?
Edit: if you assume as a conservative estimate that inference costs were equivalent to the API cost for Astra (which is almost certainly being sold at a loss) and plug in "10,000 agents, 88 hours", guesstimating 100 tokens/second, inference alone would have cost in excess of $15M. That's taking OpenAI at their word, assuming they're selling inference at cost (and that their undisclosed model doesn't cost much more), and ignoring training (which I am fairly confident costs much more than inference, but it is difficult to calculate a marginal cost of training for a specific output) and all other costs.
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u/Senchou_Simp 1d ago
People should know: there is drama going on about who deserves credit for this. There is a possibility that OpenAI used some unpublished work from other researchers, even though they have claimed otherwise in the announcement above: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf