OpenAI Just Claimed a Huge Math Discovery. Some Academics Are Crying Foul

OpenAI said today that it has found an AI-generated solution to one of the biggest problems in mathematics—a 200-year-old equation that describes the natural behavior of fluids like water and air.

The announcement appears to demonstrate the stunning power for AI to advance mathematics. But it has been marred by claims from another mathematician, Tristan Buckmaster, who says that OpenAI rushed ahead to solve the problem after learning of his and another mathematician’s progress on the problem, and also then tried to influence who got credit for the work.

The proof concerns the Navier-Stokes equation, one of the unsolved problems in the Clay Millennium prizes, which are each worth $1 million.

Sebastien Bubeck, a mathematician and AI researcher at OpenAI, said in a press briefing that the company began training a new AI model with advanced mathematical capabilities on August 28.

After reading rumors that Anthropic was making progress toward solving Navier-Stokes, Bubeck said the company decided to dedicate more resources to tackling the problem. The company had more than 1,000 agents tackle the problem over more than 50 hours before discovering that it had come up with a solution.

“I thought there must be a mistake somewhere,” Bubeck said. “And on Sunday morning we had the final solution, Lean-formalized and everything.” (Lean is a programming language that can be used to formalize mathematical proofs.)