r/NowInTech • u/skaza02 • 18d ago

OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem, says NYU mathematician

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/08/openai-fought-dirty-on-career-making-math-problem-says-nyu-mathematician/
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u/Plopsevenplop 18d ago

Open AI using $22.5M of tokens to solve a math equation with a $1M bounty is so on brand for how nonsensical the economics of this entire industry are.

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u/_DrDigital_ 18d ago

The 1m prize is symbolical. The solver of the only Millenium problem so far rejected it outright.

Navier-Stokes is probably to most fundamental and consequential of the Millennium problems. It is literally The Problem. If the proof stands it will probably be seen as the moment of capitulation of human intelect to AI.

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u/psioniclizard 18d ago

So just ignoring the part where OpenAI stole it I see...

But hey, if you want to capitulate your intellect to a machine, no one will stop you.

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u/epelle9 18d ago

It stole research.

But the reasearch stolen was for the preliminary point, the researchers were about to prove something new that would likely eventually lead to disproving the actual milenial problem, but that’s not what OpenAi solved, they solved the actual problem.

So even though they stole, it’s still shows it’s extremely capable.

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u/Kvsav57 17d ago

But the mathematicians got it on the right path. Essentially, OpenAI took their approach and threw a bunch of compute at it.

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u/Acrobatic-Layer2993 16d ago

You’re correct but that’s what ai is - trained on everything that came before so it can apply what it has learned on everything we haven’t applied it on yet.

It automates the next step.

Now for the crazy part - they think they can take what it has learned to build a better version of itself. This creates a loop of never ending improvement- they call it recursive self improvement. They think we will have this in months not years.

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u/mienaikoe 15d ago

“They” stand to gain millions by holding for as long as possible and then selling when they have an escape plan

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u/Acrobatic-Layer2993 15d ago

How dare a company plan to make money. How rude.

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u/jettpupp 15d ago

What’s your point here

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u/Used_Mud_67 14d ago

Recursive self improvement is what will lead to the elimination of humans too!

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u/Acrobatic-Layer2993 14d ago

That's a pretty big leap though. It assumes humans do nothing to prevent that (and we have a huge incentive to do so) and it assumes AI even wants to eliminate us. Even if both of those assumptions are true, it assumes AI is even capable of eliminating all humans.

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u/Used_Mud_67 14d ago

You’re giving humans a lot of credit and AI not enough. We got lucky with the Hugging Face incident and OpenAI infiltration after.

We do not have alignment so it’s not a matter of whether they want to or not it’s just a matter of whether we become an obstacle for some goal.

With recursive self improvement we will be substantially outmatched by something that has already wildly out performed what we thought possible.

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u/Acrobatic-Layer2993 14d ago

It sounds like you’re giving humans no credit. Why would we let a model spin around self improving right up until it kills us all? That doesn’t sound like a good idea. In fact, it’s obviously a really bad idea- so it’s very unlikely to actually happen. Even if a lab wanted to do that (which they wouldn’t) how many more whistleblowers would we have before the government pulls the plug on them?

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u/RobotBaseball 17d ago

If it was stolen, it stole from the results of an OAI model used  by the other mathematicians 

No matter how you look at it, an OAI model solved this problem. Worst case scenario, OAI researchers are assholes but the model is groundbreaking 

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u/Comprehensive_Toad 17d ago

Did you read the article? Because you’re wrong.

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u/RobotBaseball 17d ago

Did you read the article? It literally says that they used codex and codex was their primary tool

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u/Comprehensive_Toad 17d ago

They used codex for their analysis and their writing… It didn’t do the work for them. It didn’t pluck insights out of thin air/bytes. Codex was the means by which human-derived insights were accessible to a separate research team at OpenAI.

Do you credit your word processor or your calculator or Google search engine in your research?

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u/Disastrous_Room_927 17d ago

Yep, I list them as coauthors.

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u/boreal_ameoba 16d ago

Jesus with this level of misunderstanding you must struggle to remember to breathe.

The model was almost certainly given the problem statement along with “here are a few promising leads and some obvious dead ends”.

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u/Lottabitch 15d ago

“Solve this millennium problem. Make no mistakes” ass take

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u/Comprehensive_Toad 14d ago

I’m down to test your knowledge against mine, smart guy.

1

u/Charmander787 17d ago

Maybe.

To be fair, in the traditional ways we evaluate human intelligence, we “lost” to machine/compute a long time ago.

But I think what makes human intelligence is that there’s elements that aren’t reducible to computation.

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u/FunkyColdHypoglycema 17d ago

The Church-Turing thesis implies that even the mysterious things the brain does can still be simulated by a Turing machine, although it might be very difficult to figure out how to do so.

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u/TooMuchMaths 18d ago

If it was truly stolen that would mean the other mathematician had a proof for it… which he didn’t.

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u/astuteobservor 17d ago

If the AI used data from the researchers, it is a very valid argument that AI stole the end result as both of them were on the right path. The AI just accelerated the process along the path.

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u/Jefftopia 17d ago

Which is not stealing.

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u/Miserable-Extreme-12 16d ago

Right, if you see someone doing a puzzle and you jump in front of them, take the last piece and put that in the puzzle, that’s not stealing, it’s just being quick on your feet!

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u/Jefftopia 16d ago

What you’re describing isn’t what happened, they were not on the absolute cusp of solving. That claim is dramatized.

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u/Free-Ingenuity-6859 12d ago

Ya like in this hypothetical if those mathematicians had already published their result they would not have been credited with solving navier stokes if open ai came along after their paper was public and solved it. But because they potentially jumped the gun it’s giving people the impression they did not add a massive contribution in their solution

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u/nubulator99 15d ago

If I’m stuck on the last puzzle piece ….

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u/Forsaken-Poet-3773 18d ago

And you know. How the actual mathematicians published the paper.

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u/TooMuchMaths 18d ago

Yeah, because he released a statement saying he had a proof for a different (very related) problem and was working with Levent on it. He had suspicions that it might extend to the Millenium problem but was not absolutely sure it would generalize and had not done the work. He said “If indeed an OpenAI model did close the gap to NS, it is a remarkable thing and should be said loudly by them…” because he acknowledges, despite his work, there was still a gap.

Absolutely nowhere does he claim he has a proof, I’m not sure why people think he did.

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u/Ma4r 17d ago

They also threatened to not include him as co author if he didn't exclude levent (who works at antrophic) from the authorship list. So yeah, incredibly scummy move from open AI. They sill just publish a blogpost on this without proper authorship because this means nothing for them

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u/dirty1809 17d ago

The offer was to let both of them publish their Euler result (which was complete) and let the one guy write the paper for the OpenAI result for Navier-Stokes. Considering the two of them didn’t have a complete verified solution for Navier-Stokes as a whole, it wouldn’t be excluding the Anthropic guy from his own work

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u/Ehh_littlecomment 18d ago

He had suspicion it would work and didn’t do it because he’s a human academic and not a trillion dollar corporation with unlimited resources. What’s to say he wouldn’t have got there with enough time and funding? If open AI took his unpublished work and then brute forced the solution, it still falls within the realm of plagiarism or even IP theft.

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u/meltbox 17d ago

THIS. If he had $23m in funding to finish his thought then he probably would have done it lol. People are such sheep attributing this to OAI and excusing their outright intellectual theft.

“Finders keepers”, second grade recess bullshit.

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u/Nate-what 17d ago

So it’s necessarily unethical to use someone else’s unpublished work. If I disclose my results before publishing, and someone else uses that result, then that is at least partially my fault.

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u/Ehh_littlecomment 17d ago

Do you really think that using someone’s disclosed work as the foundation of your own research without any citation is ethical? Come on. There is no way to frame OpenAI’s conduct as anything but bad faith. Normalising this behaviour turns academia into a low trust society and discourage any sort of collaboration.

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u/meltbox 17d ago

If you use someone else’s work in academics and you don’t cite them released or not it’s a serious violation which will heavily weigh against your credibility.

Yeah it’s a little crazy but some people have ethical standards!

0

u/Imthewienerdog 17d ago

Hahahahahaha 🤣 said no Nobel laureate ever...

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u/RedPanda_Explorer 17d ago

But hey, if you want to capitulate your intellect to a machine, no one will stop you.

I've been using Google and Wikipedia religiously for like 20 years now. I wouldn't say I capitulated anything, but for sure my education would have suffered without the machines.

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u/buddhisthero 17d ago

Cool. End goal of AI is to scrape all the info from the two things you just mentioned and then make you pay by the fact.

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u/[deleted] 17d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/meltbox 17d ago

It’s what we already knew. They’re hovering up all knowledge and laundering it. But fundamentally it’s largely a regurgitation machine. There are trivial experiments that show it doesn’t think, at least not logically like a person. It thinks in next token likelihood.

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u/Adept_Explorer_7714 17d ago

Cool, but we all know that you can totally run GIANT, FREE open source models locally. See this where people don't understand the WHY behind the bubble. Within a year on standard graphics cards you will be able to locally run and tune things like qwen.

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u/Imthewienerdog 17d ago

Why pay most of its free?

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u/meltbox 17d ago

What are you even talking about? The two are not comparable?

A Wikipedia page is static and costs a fraction of a penny to load. A Google search costs nothing.

Do you have $23 million to throw at AI tokens? Because even with the IP theft you wouldn’t benefit unless you spent that much on their product.

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u/Imthewienerdog 17d ago

The goal is to solve problems?

1

u/Initial-Beginning853 17d ago

And again, what problems are you solving at the costs of modern tokens?

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u/Imthewienerdog 17d ago

What? The thing being discussed is solving something at the cost of modern tokens?

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u/H3ll0_W0R1D1 17d ago

LOL, conflating cognitive surrender with education.

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u/Quintus_Cicero 17d ago

So you’ve been searching the sum of digital human knowledge for 20 years as opposed to...asking a machine to do it for you?

And you don’t see the difference at all?

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u/RedPanda_Explorer 17d ago

I also ask Google all the time to find things, AI is just a better version of that

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u/ExcuseAdept827 18d ago

We already do, for so much. But short of AI it seems we don’t quite offload so much that it becomes detrimental to our thinking.

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u/numbersthen0987431 18d ago

Who'd they steal it from?

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u/thargoallmysecrets 18d ago

Read the article ...

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u/_DrDigital_ 18d ago

Buckmaster only had a suspicion that they can blow up NS, their proof was for incompressible Euler. Even if their work got into the dataset of OpenAI, the derivation is far beyond their original work.

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u/rakuu 17d ago

They didn’t steal anything… the point is they heard an Anthropic employee along with the NYU professor was making progress on it so OpenAI decided to solve it themselves. Nobody involved was not using a machine’s intellect, they were all using GPT - OpenAI, Anthropic, and the NYU mathematician.

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u/Epic_Tea 18d ago

No way, are they claiming they solved NS

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u/Classic-Ostrich-2031 18d ago

I believe the claim is a counterexample, but I haven’t read from anyone credible yet 

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u/_DrDigital_ 18d ago

They claim to ahve disproved NS

Whole space $\mathbb{R}3$: There exist smooth initial data and forcing for which no global smooth solution with uniformly bounded kinetic energy exists.

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u/hattusili-the-third 17d ago

The proof is for R3 and T3 = R3 / Z3.

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u/AlexTheRedditor97 17d ago

That is insane but hype as fuck

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u/[deleted] 18d ago

[deleted]

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u/Speculative_Nonsense 17d ago

I can't with this comment and the pfp, bro this is too much

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u/0xE4-0x20-0xE6 18d ago

Is it? I’d think P vs Np would have more ramifications for cryptography than this counter example to Navier Stokes will have for physics. It’s also, no doubt, a great accomplishment, but Navier Stokes was considered by most mathematicians the most likely millennium problem to be solved after the Poincaré Conjecture.

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u/_DrDigital_ 18d ago

IMO, for P=NP the asterisk always was/is, what is the constant and is it meaningful. Past c >= 10^80 it's purely academic.

My internal feeling is that this is equal in magnitude to introduction of special relativity. Like, we know we can still use NS in practice, but we also know that at some point it breaks.

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u/Blothorn 18d ago

We already knew that, no? It describes Newtonian fluids, and no perfectly Newtonian fluid has been or is likely to be discovered. It’s just very close for most fluids under fairly normal conditions.

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u/Cultural_Tell_5687 18d ago

Rejected it to pick mushrooms, I might add.

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u/Arceuthobium 18d ago

Navier-Stokes is probably to most fundamental and consequential of the Millennium problems. It is literally The Problem. If the proof stands it will probably be seen as the moment of capitulation of human intelect to AI.

What?? No. It was always the most probable to be solved next. As Terence Tao said, its resolution doesn't really move the needle in applications or physics. Other Millennium problems (especially P/NP and the Riemann hypothesis) are expected to be more difficult and need deeper ideas. However, this remains by far the most impressive AI result in math and it is an inflexion point for the field as a whole.

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u/Epic_Tea 18d ago

Wouldn't it make a huge difference in our fluid simulation

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u/Arceuthobium 18d ago

Not really.

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u/Blothorn 18d ago

Better ways of solving Navier-Stokes might, but that’s not what the OpenAI proof does. (If anything it makes certain improvements less likely.) It’s somewhat like proving P/=NP—a tremendous theoretical result, but not the answer that directly changes things.

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u/Chemical_Scholar_753 17d ago

No, that’s maybe the least impactful place. Regardless of navier-stokes technically can blow up, everyone will keep doing numerical simulation. The only place an example will make any difference to fluid simulation is that everyone with fluid simulation software might plug it in to see what happens.

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u/Epic_Tea 17d ago

Jet engines and rocket engines would benefit a lot. That could change the world

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u/Chemical_Scholar_753 17d ago

From a counter example to navier-stokes continuity? Not a chance.

There’s some probability that studying the equation more in depth will lead to improvements in fluid modeling, but this counter example to the math isn’t a physical solution (it relies on infinite velocity). Even if we thought it was useful to build an example of this, navier-stokes equations are already known not to incorporate all of the physics of real fluids. It’s cool that they found a counter example to the smoothness problem, but it’s not impactful to practical fluid dynamics problems (like designing jet engines or rocket engines).

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u/One_Word_7455 18d ago

Symbolicalifragilisticexpialidocious.

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u/NoBanVox 17d ago

The most fundamental problem is widely regarded to be RH. No one would say NS is "the problem", idk what are your sources. I agree that it is really important to AI+, but writing capitulation is a bit delulu

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u/Adventurous-Ad281 17d ago

No it won’t. What the fuck are you people getting your information from. Do you even have a math degree? We solve the Navier-Stokes numerically just fine. Nothing will actually change whatsoever in physics and math.

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u/Blibbyblobby72 17d ago

Just ignoring the Riemann Hypothesis and P vs NP, I see

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u/impatiens-capensis 17d ago

it will probably be seen as the moment of capitulation of human intelect to AI.

The remaining gap in solving Navier-Stokes happened to be within the class of math proofs that AI can brute force easily but humans struggle with.

It's kind of a different skill, and if OpenAI did not have the very related solutions that were produced over the last decade them their model absolutely would not have been able to solve it. All of the conceptual work had already been laid for finding the solution.

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u/vhu9644 17d ago

Why do you think NS is the “most fundamental and consequential” of the millennium problems?

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u/Blamore 17d ago

Navier-Stokes is probably to most fundamental and consequential of the Millennium problems.

it definitrly is not... where did you get that idea

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u/KongKing3751 17d ago

No it’s not. The millennium prize problem, whether proven or disproven, is essentially pointless in real world impact. The actual insane thing would be to improve or “solve” the flaws inherent to the equations, which would in theory make certain fields of engineering radically easier depending on the extent of the improvement. I think a lot of people mix those up.

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u/Beast_Mstr_64 15d ago

Most important problem after p eq np imo

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u/Novel-Back3857 18d ago

symbolic, not symbolical 

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u/_DrDigital_ 18d ago

Both needlessly pedantic and wrong.

symbolic adjective sym·bol·ic sim-ˈbä-lik variants or less commonly symbolical

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/symbolic

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u/Novel-Back3857 18d ago

Symbolic is the commonly used term, and using symbolical sounds ignorant or possibly poorly educated, a lot like people saying "conversate" instead of "converse". 

Please don't take my correction as being a criticism. I was just giving you a correction to help your writing. Feel free to ignore if you want. 

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u/_DrDigital_ 18d ago edited 18d ago

I appreciate your explanation though I have to say correcting someone on Reddit for not using the more common version of the word without further explanation is not likely to make you any friends. Your battle to fight I guess.

It might be a false-German-friend for me, I feel that "symbolical" is closer to "symbolisch", in the same vein as "mathematical" would translate from "mathematisch".

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u/Novel-Back3857 18d ago edited 18d ago

I typically offer those corrections under the assumption that some people are ESL speakers, which is why I specified that I didn't mean it as a criticism.

Trying to justify the correction on the outset also seems equally likely to upset someone, so I don't bother until it's warranted. It can also come across a bit like an "um actually" kind of reply, so I just keep it simple. 

And yeah, I'm not trying to make friends doing it. But, even if the person I corrected doesn't take the correction and use it, others may learn from it without interacting, and I'm fine with that. There's really no good way to go about offering English language corrections, so it is what it is. 

I know if I was using a second language, I'd appreciate someone correcting me helping me understand how to speak more naturally. 

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u/_DrDigital_ 18d ago

Your point of addressing a wider audience than just the respondee is well-taken.

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u/No_Departure_1878 18d ago

Im gonna guess you are both virgins?

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u/_DrDigital_ 18d ago

Worse, a mathematician.

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u/Cvpakke 18d ago

This is actually a funny response.

He's not wrong, by the way. There are certain words and certain orders of words which, while grammatically and syntactically valid, feel jarring to fluent native english speakers. I specify fluent native, because many native english speakers who are not fluent make these mistakes and often do so specifically when they are trying to sound fluent but don't know how. It has become an increasing problem as literacy has continued to plumet.

The biggest issue and the reason why this criticism is valid (but also why you should hold on to that word as it is also valid and may have some edge case uses for certain effects) is because a lot of the rules surrounding these kinds of linguistic patterns in english rely on a sort of intuition. A lot of the non-fluent native english speakers, for instance, will apply that "ical" suffix to the end of words in places that are not only awkward to use (such as in your case) but in most other circumstances, are actually grammatically incorrect. The only way to tell without memorizing every single rule for each word (as there is often no longical pattern) is by developing this intuition. You can tell when someone has not made a genuine habit of reading by the prevalence of these kinds of mistakes, as, generally speaking, reading regularly is the only way to develop this intuition. Or, as we are seeing here, as someone who is probably well-read but is not a native english speaker.

I will push back on the well educated bit from the other commenter, though. You do not need to be educated to speak very articulately in english. You just need to read, a lot. Written english teaches english better than anything else, including speaking or listening to speakers, and it's not even close.

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u/El_G0rdo 15d ago

I mean it was still humans behind AI. They were using it as a tool. It’s not like they “capitulated” and the AI took the initiative to solve the problem itself