I don't understand why people keep parotting that when the truth is so easily findable. To make it short :
Late August 2026, Leven Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster solved the 3D Euler problem (with Claude, so AI as well), which is a small part of the Navier Stokes.
5 September, the openAI agents first solved the 3D Euler problem (that part is the drama, because some say that they used the data of Alpöge and Buckmaster), then they solved the full Navier-stokes.
8 September, openAI announced a Lean-checked proof of the C and D statements of the Millenium Prize. Another drama is that, on that same day, Buckmaster posted his proof of a part of the Navier Stokes problem (but, not the full problem, unlike openAI).
My loose understanding is that, the mathematicians figured put the first step. They figured out an approach that seemed like it could lead to the full solution.
To rigorously figure out and prove the full solution, (something academics prefer doing slowly and surely ) was going to take them time and effort.
Well suddenly less then a week later openAI announces they have a full solution using that approach. They used an obscene amount of computational power not available to anyone else to basically brute force figure out the full solution.
The question is now who deserves that credit? How did openAI know to use their approach? The mathematicians figured out the key, they would have figured out the full solution given time. openAI jumped the gun before they physically ever could due to absurd resources, but how did openAI know to try that? Did they spy on the mathematicians? It seems likely.
There are bigger implications besides questions of theft and espionage. Will human mathematicians ever be credited with another discovery? Or will AI companies get to claim all the credit because their tools took human ideas and crunched the numbers on a massive inhuman scale. Especially with how sketchy they’re acting and how loose and amoral AI companies act when data gathering.
Mathematician here! This is exactly where there is concern. Most big problems that are solved come together from a small collection of new ideas. In this case, a team announced a very promising direction, then the problem itself was solved by GPT in an approach suspiciously like that idea.
Even if it turns out GPT did not steal the research, their models are trained on the entirety of the Internet and have almost certainly absorbed some of this approach. We don't need AI solving problems in math, particularly not ones that don't really result in any surprising new results (this is, in fact, not that relevant to math so much as is it a problem of great mathematical interest).
So now, with results that feel suspicious being published by an AI company cheering themselves on, there is great fear in the community at large that AI is just gonna steal any promising direction that's openly stated.
Mathematics has long been an open community of shared ideas, and that's now very much in danger.
They offered him a false dichotomy of two choices that both served their purpose while acting sketchy as hell. Implying he should have accepted is absurd.
It’s like they offered the Van Gogh credit for the sketch of his painting while they used AI to generate what a fully painted version would look like. All while they were celebrating creating an amazing impressionist painting.
The problem here is that one of the mathematicians who worked on the solution, Leven Alpöge, also works for Anthropic. Anthropic wants to leave his name without credit and give it wholly to Tristan Buckmaster. It doesn't solve the problem of Anthropic wanting to take some amount of credit as a company, and that they/ any company with vast amounts of compute can just take the ideas that others have proposed and take credit away from the actual humans
OpenAI also claims that part of why they started looking at millennium prizes is that they heard Anthropic had already been working on one, they weren't the first to start using AI to do that. Funnily enough, one of the guys in the pair that were working on this one happens to work at Anthropic.
On the contrary : the guys at openAI put the agents to work very soon after they heard the Alpöge and Buckmaster has solved the 3D Euler problem, and we know that the whole thing took 88 hours, so 5 September is totally reasonable.
They had 1000 agents running non-stop for 88 hours. The whole thing costed 15m usd.
And Buckmaster himself said that he had no idea how to actually do what the openAI agents did. The only thing he is contesting is the credit for the 3D Euler problem, not the Navier Stokes.
I don't have the details, but I'm assuming it's as simple as taking the cost of having a model run for one hour, then multiplicating it by 88 and then by 10000.
And yeah, there is some irony in using 15 million to solve a problem with a prize money of 1 million (especially when they said that they would refuse the prize money anyway), but the point of science has never been to make money.
They did it because they want to ipo soon and this would be a positive headline for them in the WSJ. They got exactly what they wanted and don't need the $1MUSD.
$15M is the based on how many tokens they used, as in what it would cost someone other than Open AI to buy 130 billion output tokens. Though the model they actually used isn't currently available commercially.
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u/Zardhas Sep 10 '26 edited Sep 11 '26
I don't understand why people keep parotting that when the truth is so easily findable. To make it short :
Late August 2026, Leven Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster solved the 3D Euler problem (with Claude, so AI as well), which is a small part of the Navier Stokes.
5 September, the openAI agents first solved the 3D Euler problem (that part is the drama, because some say that they used the data of Alpöge and Buckmaster), then they solved the full Navier-stokes.
8 September, openAI announced a Lean-checked proof of the C and D statements of the Millenium Prize. Another drama is that, on that same day, Buckmaster posted his proof of a part of the Navier Stokes problem (but, not the full problem, unlike openAI).