You should care about the AI math breakthrough drama even if you're not a nerd

The big drama in AI land today is decidedly nerdy stuff.

But the hubbub highlights a concern everyone should care about: Can what you type into AI help train a machine that one day beats you at your own game?

On Monday, Tristan Buckmaster, an NYU mathematician, and Levent Alpöge, a mathematician who works at Anthropic, released papers claiming new results related to a famously thorny scientific question: Can the math used to predict the movement of water and air suddenly hit a breaking point?

Solving that problem could lead to a $1 million prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute. While the pair didn't claim to have achieved that particular breakthrough, Terence Tao, a well-known mathematician, called the work "remarkable" in a Mastodon post.

But it was the four-page statement that Buckmaster published alongside the findings, which included some explosive allegations involving OpenAI, that captured people's attention. He alleged that OpenAI learned of the pair's findings — and told him an internal AI model had made progress on solving the $1 million question.

On Tuesday, OpenAI formally claimed it had achieved a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem — "one of the deepest problems at the frontier of mathematics."