IIUC, the accusation was not to try to remove Alpöge from the paper he wrote with Buckmaster solving the "easier" conjeture, but to exclude Alpöge in the followup paper where Buckmaster review the OpenAI solution of the "full" conjeture.
For comparison, if you offer me to collaborate in a paper about Algebra I may agree to go alone, but if the paper is about Quantum Chemistry I have to piggyback a few coworkers because we are collaborating in that topic for a long time and I already discussed may of the topics and I may even discuss the new paper too.
Yeah I think the verb "removed" is not the right verb here, because the paper in question is OpenAI's hypothetical paper which Alpöge is not on in the first place.
Because he works for Anthropic. Supposedly this project was not part of his official capacity as an employee of theirs.
However, if they had published first, it's hard to imagine Anthropic not taking the opportunity to claim "our employee solved this Millennium prize problem using our AI".
> [the Open AI rep] twice asserted that he wanted Levent removed from authorship, and said it would all be simple if only it were not the case that, and it was so annoying that, Levent works at Anthropic.
Later on the author claims that the OpenAI rep threatened to ruin his career if he didn't go along with them.
Worth noting that there were two versions of the problem:
- the proof in the equations with viscosity (which OpenAI claims to have solved), and
- the proof with no viscosity (which Tristian and Levent solved)
What is confusing is that if OpenAI can prove their independence from Levent and Tristian, they could take full credit for proving the viscous version of the problem. Offering to give one author credit for something they proved seems like a strange choice: if nothing else it seems obvious that it would drive a very deep wedge between the two authors of the non-viscous version.
It seems very hard for OpenAI to prove that independence. Since they seem unable to exclude the possibility that their model was trained on transcripts by the two mathematicians.
They didn't want his name removed from any paper. The invitation was to write a new joint paper between Buckmaster and OpenAI. An invitation Alpoge couldn't accept and OpenAI wouldn't make since he worked for a competitor.
This is blatant scientific misconduct.