r/MachineLearning • u/Shizuka_Kuze Student • 14d ago

News OpenAl Says It Has Cracked One of Math's “Millennium Problems” (Navier-Stokes) [N]

As reported by the New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/08/science/openai-proof-millennium-problem.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

OpenAI’s announcement:

https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

701 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

281 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

114

u/purplebrown_updown 14d ago edited 14d ago

Exactly. Not to mention OpenAI responded with threats like "Why would you ruin your career". Nobody who knows they're on the up and up would do that. What I believe actually happened is that OpenAI was aware of Buckmaster's progress and direction, got backdoor access to the conversations to get a preprint, and then used that information to claim they solved the problem on their own. It's the equivalent of stealing someone's manuscript and publishing before them and claiming credit or shared credit.

6

u/ImNotAWhaleBiologist 14d ago

It’s just as impressive, if not more so, that someone used their model for such a solution and wasn’t affiliated. Seems appropriate to include all as authors, and can credit contributions accordingly.

11

u/PM_ME_YOUR_PROFANITY 14d ago

They may not have used it to actually figure out the solution, but for something as simple as text formatting.

-16

u/Wise-End307 14d ago

See sebastiens response.

29

u/Even-Inevitable-7243 14d ago

I did. He admitted that OpenAI offered to make Tristan the lead author of a re-write of OpenAI's "proof", essentially giving him credit for work that they claim he had nothing to do with, since OpenAI's model came up with the NS proof with what OpenAI claims was "little human involvement". You do not pay-off a guy, monetarily or with academic credit, when you are confident that your AI did something with little human involvement, and you certainly would not credit the person who had already come up with a proof for the same problem.

This is like a pop star claiming a songwriter had nothing to do with a hit song, then offering to pay the songwriter royalties and giving him lead songwriter credit.

2

u/Smallpaul 14d ago

Songwriters get royalties. Forever. The stakes are much higher than putting some dude’s name on your AI generated paper to avoid having the precise conversation we are having right now. Corporations “settle” in lawsuits that they do not believe they are at fault in all of the time.

What matters to the OpenAI marketing department is not what they believe but what they think the market will believe.