> The Wednesday evening statement from OpenAI was more emphatic: “We can say categorically that it is impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training.”
> The statement added, “After investigating, we can say with full confidence that no user inputs past July 3rd could have influenced this system in any way.”
It's great to hear that they've investigated and concluded there was zero change Tristan's prompts made it into training data for the model that solved NS.
It would have been better for them to have done this before they announced the NS solution, so that two days' worth of misinformation would not have spread wildly.
This is a tragic story. But it is also a story about the lengths that parents in China will go to improve the quality of life for their only child or to "save face" to their social circle about how their child is performing relative to others.
It's quite tragic that they felt the need to lean into this treatment and quite tragic that they were led on. Just a sad story all around.
It’s been ended officially but due to social pressures to “put all your resources into one child” as the parents were accustomed to, having just one child is still a strong cultural factor. The CCP can’t just flip a switch and suddenly the whole culture aligns with having many children.
In fact, China fertility rare went down no lower than 1.5 during the one-child policy. In 2024 however, it was 1.03 child/woman, and last year it sank to less than 1 child per woman.
But of course there are huge disparities between cities and rural areas.
> The statement added, “After investigating, we can say with full confidence that no user inputs past July 3rd could have influenced this system in any way.”
It's great to hear that they've investigated and concluded there was zero change Tristan's prompts made it into training data for the model that solved NS.
It would have been better for them to have done this before they announced the NS solution, so that two days' worth of misinformation would not have spread wildly.