Earlier this month, OpenAI announced that it had found a solution for one of the biggest unsolved problems in math, the Navier-Stokes equations, by directing 10,000 of its powerful AI agents to work on the enigma for 88 hours straight. It was an occasion fraught with controversy, however, as mathematicians accused the company of essentially stealing their work.
That controversy is still rippling through the math world. But what has the AI’s solution taught us? Not a lot, as it turns out, because the proof it wrote, while technically correct, is borderline incomprehensible.
“So far it’s been very difficult to really extract any human understanding from this new AI proof,” James Maynard, an Oxford mathematician, told NPR.
“The paper is not written for humans,” echoed Javier Gómez-Serrano, a mathematician at Brown University who uses AI in his own research. The AI’s proof could help the field after “some serious re-writing,” he added, but “as of today, the paper doesn’t teach us much.”
