<\/p>\n
On Monday, NYU\u2019s Buckmaster posted a proof on the social media site Mastodon showing that a simplified version of the Navier\u2013Stokes equations can indeed break down\u2014a major step forward on the Millennium Problem. He and Alp\u00f6ge had worked on the problem for almost a year, using publicly available models from both OpenAI and Anthropic. Then today, OpenAI presented a proof showing that the full Navier\u2013Stokes equations can break down as well. The proof was obtained using an internal model that dramatically outperforms the already-impressive Astra model, which was only released last week. The company says it does not plan to claim the million-dollar prize for solving the problem.<\/p>\n
These mathematical achievements are indisputably impressive, but they have attracted far less attention than the controversy about their origins. Along with the proof, Buckmaster posted a document detailing his interactions with OpenAI employees after he heard rumors about their work and reached out to one of them. According to him, OpenAI employees presented two possibilities to him: Either he and Alp\u00f6ge could post their work and OpenAI would post their Navier-Stokes solution the following day, or he could work with OpenAI on a Navier-Stokes paper that excluded Alp\u00f6ge from authorship, due to his affiliation with Anthropic, OpenAI\u2019s biggest rival. Buckmaster also wrote that he asked the employees whether the agents had obtained access to transcripts of the work that he and Alp\u00f6ge had done with OpenAI models, which they denied; and whether OpenAI models had been trained on those transcripts, to which they offered no response. MIT Technology Review <\/em>reached out to Buckmaster for comment, but didn\u2019t hear back before publication.<\/p>\n The clear implication of the document is that OpenAI\u2019s models somehow made use of Buckmaster and Alp\u00f6ge\u2019s work. That scenario is plausible on its face. The Buckmaster\/Alp\u00f6ge and OpenAI proofs both make use of an approach to the Navier-Stokes problem pioneered by the mathematicians Diego C\u00f3rdoba and Luis Mart\u00ednez-Zoroa. According to Javier G\u00f3mez-Serrano, a mathematics professor at Brown University, this approach was one of several that was thought to hold promise for solving the Navier-Stokes problem. So, while it\u2019s by no means impossible that both teams could have arrived at this approach independently, it\u2019s also conceivable that Buckmaster and Alp\u00f6ge\u2019s work could have influenced OpenAI\u2019s.<\/p>\n In the press briefing, Mark Chen, OpenAI\u2019s chief research officer, again denied that any agents or OpenAI employees accessed Buckmaster and Alp\u00f6ge\u2019s transcripts\u2014but given what has been\u00a0revealed about the Hugging Face hack, it\u2019s clear that OpenAI is not always entirely aware of what its agents are doing.\u00a0<\/p>\n If OpenAI\u2019s models did train on Buckmaster and Alp\u00f6ge\u2019s work, or if its agents somehow gained access to it, then the company\u2019s failure to track down the truth and assign those researchers appropriate credit reflects poorly on it. But there might be a thin silver lining to that version of the story for mathematicians, because it would suggest that the hard work of two humans, one of whom is a prominent expert on Navier-Stokes, was essential to the agents\u2019 ability to solve the Millennium Problem. Experts have long identified \u201cresearch taste,\u201d or the ability to choose promising research questions and directions, as a major obstacle for AI in science and mathematics. If the OpenAI agents did indeed choose to follow the C\u00f3rdoba\u2013Mart\u00ednez-Zoroa approach because Buckmaster and Alp\u00f6ge had done the same, then human research taste played an essential role in OpenAI\u2019s success.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n #OpenAIs #latest #controversy #tells #future #math<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Monday, NYU\u2019s Buckmaster posted a proof on the social media site Mastodon showing that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21580,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[7268,1660,696,4716,1572,1539],"class_list":["post-21579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories","tag-controversy","tag-future","tag-latest","tag-math","tag-openais","tag-tells"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/math-2c.jpg",1200,600,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/math-2c-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/math-2c-300x150.jpg",300,150,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/math-2c-768x384.jpg",640,320,true],"large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/math-2c-1024x512.jpg",640,320,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/math-2c.jpg",1200,600,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/math-2c.jpg",1200,600,false],"covernews-featured":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/math-2c-1024x512.jpg",1024,512,true],"covernews-medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/math-2c-540x340.jpg",540,340,true]},"author_info":{"display_name":"admin","author_link":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?author=1"},"category_info":"Stories<\/a>","tag_info":"Stories","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}