OpenAI says it has solved one of math’s “Millennium Problems”

OpenAI on Tuesday said its artificial intelligence technology has cracked one of the Millennium Problems –– seven famously difficult and unsolved questions in mathematics that have stumped even the world’s brightest minds.

In a release of its findings, the company said an internal model, not released to the public, solved the Navier-Stokes problem, a 200-year-old puzzle related to the motion of fluids.

The company said its model took 88 hours to solve the problem, and that it used as many as 10,000 “AI agents” working somewhat concurrently.

“This milestone represents substantial work by mathematicians and AI researchers. However, this is not a culmination, but rather a snapshot in time, of progress on AI development,” the company wrote in its statement.

Yet the notice has also raised a stir in the mathematics community for another reason.

The night before OpenAI’s announcement, New York University math professor Tristan Buckmaster released a statement saying he and Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge had been looking into the Navier-Stokes problem –– a culmination of work that began last year – and had used a mix of large language models, including OpenAI’s Codex.

As they prepared to go public with their results, they say they reached out to OpenAI researchers –– and later learned researchers were about to make a similar discovery.