Drama swirls around OpenAI’s legendary mathematical milestone

OpenAI says it found a solution to a major math problem that has remained unsolved for around 90 years, as reported earlier by The New York Times and Wired. In a blog post on Tuesday, OpenAI announced that it discovered a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem — which relates to the flow of liquid and gas — using an internal AI model more powerful than the newly released GPT-6 Astra alongside 10,000 concurrent agents. The Navier-Stokes problem is one of seven Millennium Prize Problems, each of which comes with a $1 million reward for solving.

OpenAI says it started training the internal AI model on August 28th, which has “exhibited unprecedented performance in our benchmarks, including mathematics.” The solution is a big breakthrough for the mathematics community, but it doesn’t come without controversy.

Just one day before OpenAI’s announcement, New York University mathematics professor Tristan Buckmaster published findings on a related problem in partnership with Levent Alpöge, a researcher at Anthropic. When announcing these findings, Buckmaster claims he contacted OpenAI after learning the company had heard about their progress. However, Buckmaster found that OpenAI had produced a proof for the Navier-Stokes equation using a route he and Alpöge had been working on with OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude.