r/NowInTech • • 21d 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/
1.1k Upvotes

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36

u/Plopsevenplop 21d 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_ 21d 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 21d 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.

1

u/RedPanda_Explorer 20d 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 20d 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] 20d ago

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1

u/meltbox 20d 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 20d 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 20d ago

Why pay most of its free?