OpenAI just wants to win
OpenAI says roughly 10,000 agents and tens of millions in compute solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem in 88 hours, amid controversy.
OpenAI claims an advanced unreleased model, run with about 10,000 agents and tens of millions of dollars of compute for 88 hours, produced a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, one of seven $1 million Millennium Prize problems set by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. NYU professor Tristan Buckmaster, who was pursuing the problem with Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge, accused OpenAI of racing his team and of possibly benefiting from his Codex prompts; OpenAI categorically denied both. OpenAI researcher Sébastien Bubeck acknowledged offering Buckmaster compute and authorship arrangements, which Buckmaster characterized as a bribe, while many mathematicians expressed unease at OpenAI's competitive conduct.
- OpenAI used ~10,000 agents and 88 hours of compute on Navier-Stokes
- Only the Poincaré conjecture had been solved since the prizes were set in 2000
- Buckmaster alleges his Codex prompts may have contributed; OpenAI denies this
- Rivalry involving an Anthropic researcher fueled the controversy
- More than a dozen mathematicians described the field as shaken by OpenAI's conduct
- Products
- Codex
- Organizations
- Clay Mathematics InstituteNYU
From the original article
12 min read at theverge.com
OpenAI has spent the last few years planting flags across the increasingly difficult terrain in mathematics. This week, it claimed one of its biggest prizes yet: a solution to a legendary Millennium Prize problem. In normal circumstances, this would have been celebrated as a historic achievement.
By Robert Hart · theverge.com
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.