OpenAI's Unreleased Model Claims Navier–Stokes Prize, Sparking Scoop Accusations
The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
OpenAI used an unreleased model to produce a resolution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems. The announcement is overshadowed by accusations from NYU professor Tristan Buckmaster, who claims OpenAI scooped his year-long collaboration with Anthropic's Levent Alpöge. OpenAI denies accessing their work but admits it cannot rule out that de-identified data from their usage of its products helped improve its models. The incident raises questions about the role of rumors in AI-driven mathematical discovery and the opaque use of user data in model training.
While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.
- bob1029
> ... we heard rumors that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved. Inspired by these rumors ...
I've observed this exact effect last week. I made a discovery regarding a stepwise performance improvement in a codebase. I shared the benchmark results with a peer and within 12 hours they replicated the same. We had both been looking for this for years.
I think giving someone hope that an answer exists might as well be the same thing as giving them the answer these days. Competition is a hell of a drug, and frontier LLMs aggressively compound that energy.
- burrish
>While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.
What do you mean, as OpenAI employee, you cannot tell that his work has entered the training data ?
But also correct me if I'm wrong, if the two mathematician were really close to finish this problem, and their conversation were used by OpenAI,
shouldn't the Agent have succeeded way faster/efficiently instead of using "4.9 million messages and used about 300 billion output tokens."
- pietz
I find the claims from OpenAI somehow more relatable and reasonable.
- They threw compute on a problem another team/company was rumored to have solved to see what their secret model could do.
- The texts I read do make it seem like OpenAI wanted to talk and share credit generously.
- Imagine working on a frontier math problem with someone at Anthropic and not only do you use Codex but also through a non-business account that allows training on your data.
- Timeline-wise, if they mainly used GPT 5.6 it's unlikely any meaningful data made it into an model that's being internally validated right now.
- civvv
LLM’s seem very good at solving mathematical problems of which there is an enormous amount of exisiting work/attempts in their training data. This is an amazing capability, but does not convince me that these models are «thinking» or «reasoning» in the way a human does. A human mathematician could in theory categorize/discover an entirely new field of mathematics tomorrow, based purely on their «human intelligence», I wonder if we will see similar examples by LLM’s soon. It seems to me currently impossible that LLM’s can replace human mathematicians, because of their (assumption) likely dependence on human input in the sense of enormous amounts of pre-existing attempts/data.
If an entirely new problem, within a new field of mathematics were to appear tomorrow, I highly doubt an LLM would be useful at all on their own. Is this the «ultimate ASI test»?
- tosh
> My two favourite hypothetical questions regarding this used to be:
> If I'm running Codex and one of my API keys accidentally gets consumed in the context, what are the chances that someone else might ask for an API key in the future and get mine back? (I asked someone at OpenAI once and they called this the "regurgitation" problem and assured me that they take great pains to prevent that... but wouldn't describe how.)
> If I brainstorm with ChatGPT about potential new directions for my company, what's the chance that information might be exposed to a competitor in six months' time who asks "what might company X plan to do next"?
> My new preferred hypothetical for this is:
> If I use ChatGPT to help me partially solve a Millennium Prize problem, what are the chances that my work will influence training such that a later model helps someone else solve it first?
- geraneum
Having in mind the allegations by Apple against OpenAI, I don't find it unthinkable that there could've been some form of misconduct happening there.
- shellfishgene
What's missing from the story I think is the part about "...then had a breakthrough on August 15th. The mathematical rumour mill kicked into gear...". If only the two of them were working on the problem in secret, how did their breakthrough become a rumor?
- michalsustr
If you'd like to explore what the Navier–Stokes blow-up construction looks like visually, I vibe-coded an interactive 3D visualization based on the published result for fun :)
Demo: https://minfx.ai/navier-stokes/
Source code: https://github.com/minfx-ai/navier-stokes-blowup