Andreas Thom
Role at the time: Mathematician, TU Dresden
Statement summary
Mathematician Andreas Thom, in a guest post on Terence Tao's blog, said he asked OpenAI researchers Mark Sellke and Sébastien Bubeck whether conversations he and a colleague had with ChatGPT about his research were part of the training data or accessible to the model's reasoning process, and that Sellke denied it. Thom calls that denial materially misleading in light of OpenAI's later statement in the Buckmaster-Alpöge case that it could not rule out that de-identified usage data helped improve its models. He also writes that Bubeck's acknowledged career-related remark to Buckmaster and his objection to including Alpöge in a proposed paper presenting OpenAI's proof "deepen my concern about their commitment to academic standards."