What's going on with OpenAI and the Navier-Stokes controversy?

Artificial intelligence has solved a major mathematics problem, but credit for the accomplishment is murky.

OpenAI announced today that it has found a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the longest-standing puzzles in mathematics. It's a major accomplishment, but the news has been marred by a debate over whether the company acted based on unpublished research from other parties. Additionally, OpenAI has been accused of attempting to influence who will receive credit for the achievement in publication.

The Navier-Stokes problem

First, some background. The Millennium Prize Problems are a group of seven complex questions established by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. The organization is offering a reward of $1 million for solutions to each of these questions, all of which have stymied mathematicians for decades, if not centuries. Since the prize's creation, only one of the other problems from the collection had previously been solved.

The Navier-Stokes problem centers on fluid dynamics, the rules for analyzing the behavior of both liquids and gasses. The angle that had been posed to mathematicians, in extreme layperson terms, is whether there are any edge cases where the original set of Navier-Stokes equations lead to results that cannot happen in reality.