OpenAI claims to have solved maths problem that stumped humans for decades

OpenAI claims to have solved a major mathematics problem that has stumped humans for nearly a century after spending millions of dollars on the artificial intelligence-led endeavour.

The company behind ChatGPT said it had cracked the Navier-Stokes problem, one of seven Millennium Prize Problems published by the Clay Mathematics Institute to highlight some of the biggest unsolved puzzles in the field.

However, the announcement swiftly became mired in controversy after mathematician Tristan Buckmaster, a professor at New York University, said OpenAI accelerated its work on the problem after hearing that he and another researcher at Anthropic, an OpenAI rival, were poised to announce their own breakthrough.

Buckmaster had further concerns because the pair’s work in progress was stored in OpenAI’s Codex model, which is used for writing computer programs, potentially making the work visible to the OpenAI team.

In a document posted on his website, he added: “I do not know what their model did, or how. I do not know whether our data was used. I am not accusing anyone of anything.”

At a press briefing on Tuesday, OpenAI researcher Sebastien Bubeck denied that the company had used the pair’s work or accessed material shared with OpenAI’s servers.