On Tuesday, OpenAI announced that it had found a solution for a famous unsolved problem in mathematics by using a swarm of advanced AI agents. But the occasion quickly unraveled into an explosive scandal, with mathematicians accusing the company of stealing their work.
OpenAI’s purported solution was for one of the so-called Navier-Stokes equations, which mathematically describe how fluids, ranging from wind to ocean currents, move and behave. These differential equations — equations that describe how different quantities change in relation to others — have been used for nearly two centuries with reliable results, but scientists have long wondered if there are scenarios where their predictions break down and describe something that’s physically impossible. In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute listed the Navier-Stokes as one of its six Millennium Problems, with a prize of $1 million for being the first to solve each one.
Enter OpenAI, which claims it found a way to break the Navier-Stokes by unleashing 10,000 of its AI agents on the problem for 88 hours, costing millions of dollars in computing costs, according to OpenAI’s head of research Mark Chen. The long and short of some exceedingly complicated math was that the legions of AI agents identified an apparent scenario in which the equations can describe fluids accelerating to an infinite velocity — resulting a so-called “blowup” or singularity. This, as far as we know, is impossible, thus demonstrating that the equations have a breaking point.
But hours before OpenAI’s formal announcement came an explosive claim from the NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster, who had been working on the problem for years before OpenAI got involved, and was close to publishing his own solution.
