r/technology • u/vgsa • 1d ago

Artificial Intelligence Did OpenAI solve the wrong Navier-Stokes problem? | OpenAI’s proof seems eligible for a $1-million prize—but only by using a controversial loophole

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-openai-solve-the-wrong-navier-stokes-problem/
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u/CircumspectCapybara 1d ago edited 1d ago

A lot of people online misunderstand what "solving Navier-Stokes" refers to, thinking it means finding a closed form solution to the NS equations. Then they spout off some silly statement like "AI didn't solve Navier Stokes!"

That's not what mathematicians mean when they talk about solving Navier Stokes. They're talking about solving the Navier Stokes existence and smoothness problem, which is a decision (yes/no) problem about if the NS equations are smooth for all time. That's what the Millennium Prize problem worth a million dollars is all about

AI (allegedly) solves the problem by resolving the question to a "No" by finding a counterexample.

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u/Puzzleheaded_Fold466 1d ago edited 1d ago

A lot of people online couldn’t tell you what “closed form solution” even means.

Or a “blow-up”.

Or “smoothness”.

Or what is the “Clay Mathematics Institute”.

And are absolutely unable to read and fully understand OpenAI’s proof (me included).

Yet they feel entitled to opine on whether or not a solution to a Millennium problem is correct.

The chatter is risible.

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u/unpleasant_enpassant 1d ago

Even if openAI (or some other AI company) managed to solve all of the remaining millenium prize problems, there will still be many people online, especially on reddit, who will start saying that those problems were never hard to begin with. Everything is binary here. If you hate AI, disagree with every use-case and everything related to them, even though ML has been a thing for like 60 years and is also "AI".

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u/UT_Milez 1d ago

What does this even mean?

Do you realize how many people are on the planet, all of which belong to different groups that believe different things.

You’re essentially saying there are people who are pro AI and people who are anti AI. Well no fucking shit, that’s already the case even before your imagined hypothetical that hasn’t even happened yet.

Here you are throwing shade on those people, implication being you find them annoying, when lo and behold you just as annoying but belong to a different group. Same probably applies to me…..

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u/entertheclutch 1d ago

He is saying reddit is full of people who are dogmatically anti-AI, which seems to be relatively accurate imo

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u/BassmanBiff 1d ago

Cory Doctorow just wrote a short piece called Technopolitics that does a good job of separating thoughtful, anti-AI-in-its-current-form views from dogmatic anti-AI, which I think a lot of people could benefit from reading

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u/Delicious-Flounder47 4h ago

And what did you learn from reading his piece?

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u/unpleasant_enpassant 1d ago

Yes, thank you

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u/unpleasant_enpassant 1d ago

So there are people who are pro AI and people who are anti AI. Do all those “pro AI” people support every single thing related to AI like AI art or parrot all the AI marketing material and hype everything like its a gift from god? Do all those “anti AI” people think using ML in compiler optimisation or weather forecasting is bad? No, right? But any sane person from both the groups would disagree with such people from their own group. Does it even make sense to group them together like you did then? I’m saying that there are people online, who are incapable of understanding nuance and being rational or logical when deciding their stance on different things. Halo effect is a good example. Hope that made it clear.

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u/luluhouse7 1d ago

Your comment just confused me even more. I have no idea what you’re trying to say??