Did OpenAI Steal the Navier-Stokes Solution? | E2335

Lon Harris (0:00)

NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster put out a statement saying, OpenAI only started prompting its model on this problem after word of his own work reached the company.

Rebecca Lynn (0:10)

Not surprised at all. You look at the YouTubes and the Dropboxes and the like, right? I mean, it's a common trend.

Ben Lerer (0:15)

Trust these companies with your data at your own peril to some degree.

Yohei Nakajima (0:18)

And in the scientific community, right, people are very conscious about what they share with who because they want to control who builds on top of their work. And if you start doing that work in ChatGPT, I mean, Claude, there is a possibility that it makes the next researcher find that direction faster. Agents are scraping the entire web looking for partial solutions and can build on it. So the importance of locking in your research becomes increasingly stronger.

Jason Calacanis (0:42)

I would not trust them with anything that's important or proprietary. This idea that you're going to give instinct or Zuckerberg your Gmail, then your Notion, then your docs, then your databases means they're going to steal your IP, train it and then give it to your competitors.

SPEAKER_6 (1:00)

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Jason Calacanis (1:43)

All right, everybody.

Welcome back. This Week in Startups we do our This Week in VC roundtable every Wednesday. What do we do on this roundtable? Well, Lon reads the news. I do a bit of moderation there and we have three great guests who are active investors in startup companies. And we've got quite a lineup today. Lon, introduce our guests, please.

Lon Harris (2:04)

Yeah, well, first up we've got Yohei Nakajima. He is the general partner at Untapped Capital and he also runs Agent Fund, a 2025 angelist rolling fund for autonomous agent startups. Plus Ben Lerer, he's the co-founder of Lerer Hippeau.

Ben Lerer (2:20)

That's a major firm.

Jason Calacanis (2:21)

What a guess.

Lon Harris (2:22)

C firm he started in 2021 Finally, we've got Rebecca Lynn. She's the co-founder of Canvas Prime and a five times Ford Midasless entrance.

Jason Calacanis (2:34)

There you go.

Yohei Nakajima (2:35)

Welcome everybody.

Ben Lerer (2:36)

Jason had no idea that I was on. He's just like, oh my God. Like, wow.

Yohei Nakajima (2:40)

I was hamming it up.

Jason Calacanis (2:41)

I mean, come on, man.

Yohei Nakajima (2:43)

Ben showed up.

Jason Calacanis (2:44)

Amazing.

Ben Lerer (2:45)

I mean, you know, whatever.

Jason Calacanis (2:48)

Listen, we have got a crazy docket. And Lon, I guess we have to talk about the end of the world and how we're all going to manage that because, you know, typically our funds last 10 to 15 years, but right now I'm trying to figure out how to get DPI. If in fact the world is ending in 10 years or 2030, according to Anthropic. So let's discuss this for the 50th time this year, Anthropic people quitting and OpenAI folks have done it as well. But let's discuss people quitting because they saw into the black AI box and decided it's the end of days and we're all going to die.

Rebecca Lynn (3:30)

But he's just going to start a hedge fund or a venture fund, right, Jason? I mean, isn't that what's coming next? I expect that to be the next announcement.

Jason Calacanis (3:37)

That would be, that would be. Lon, tee it up for us. Who is this lunatic and then his coworker lunatic who decided he would retweet it?

Lon Harris (3:47)

So, this is Jacob Coxon. He's a 27-year-old pre-training researcher, spent three years at OpenAI, credited as a core contributor to GPT-40. Before moving over to Anthropic in July, he joined Anthropic specifically because of its safety reputation. About two months later, he quit the company and the industry entirely in a seven-post thread on exit already has tens of millions of views. He told the Wall Street Journal that researchers inside these labs have started using words like crunch time and end game and that by the end of next year, some of the most aggressive scenarios could already be out of control. Then it got stranger because two current Anthropic researchers publicly agreed with him, including Alignment Scientist Lead, Evan Hubinger, who said that he personally puts the odds of AI killing all humans in the next decade, around 10 percent, give or take, 10 percent chance we all die. And all this is landing while Anthropic, of course, reportedly heading toward an IPO at something like a $2 trillion valuation, with its safety first reputation as a central part of the pitch to investors. Yohei, what are you making of this latest instance of doomerism?