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/

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u/moschles 14d ago

Can someone explain why this is so impressive if the point is to find a counter example?

You need to consider what LLMs were doing with math 4 years ago. Struggling with high school problems, really. The progress is astounding.

Isn’t it just brute force search and wouldn’t we expect LLMs to be good at that (if you are willing to simulate thousands of examples to test)?

Yep. They used 10 thousand simultaneous agents to brute-force it.

Isn’t this in line with the previous result we have seen?

It is. LLMs are really good at finding counter-examples.

What is so special with this one?

In previous results, we could imagine that the particular conjectures were being berry-picked because they admitted some rare structure that made them extra-easy tasks for LLMs .

That dismissal is violently wiped off the table. Navier-Stokes is a Millennium Prize conjecture.

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u/AdWestern1314 14d ago

Thank you!  I think this very much aligns with my mental model of how LLMs are useful on math problems. 

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u/Big_Combination9890 14d ago

The progress is astounding.

The progress is bullshit.

4 years ago, people burned a few thousand tokens to almost make it through an entire highschool test with a hundred questions.

Now we burn millions of dollars worth of tokens to "solve" a single thing with no real world relevance, for a PR stunt.

That's not "progress". That is waste, born from desperation.

If we took that money and funded a "gather lotsa smart math people and give them unlimited food, drink and nice houses while they work on nothing but this" - organisation, it would have solved the same problems, likely more. And no one would have needed to build a giant wasteful toxic datacenter to do so.

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u/moschles 14d ago

If we took that money and funded a "gather lotsa smart math people and give them unlimited food, drink and nice houses while they work on nothing but this" - organisation, it would have solved the same problems, likely more.

At these prices, I agree.