OpenAI said it had developed a solution to a mathematical problem involving the Navier–Stokes equations that had remained unsolved for nearly 90 years. The company said it used approximately 10,000 artificial intelligence tools that performed tasks partly autonomously and reached the result in 88 hours.
OpenAI described the work as a “milestone” demonstrating the rapid development of artificial intelligence tools. The company also said it had used approximately 3 million messages and 130 billion data items in the mathematical model it began developing at the end of August.
Clay Institute has not accepted the solution
OpenAI’s announced solution has not yet undergone independent verification. The U.S.-based Clay Mathematics Institute, which awards the Millennium Prizes in mathematics, has also not officially accepted the solution so far.
Buckmaster and Alpöge’s work becomes subject of debate
Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematics professor at New York University, said he had been working on the same problem with mathematician Levent Alpöge, who works at Anthropic. Buckmaster argued that OpenAI had used the work of the two mathematicians.
Buckmaster also claimed that OpenAI began working on a solution to the problem after he and Alpöge published their work. OpenAI congratulated the two mathematicians on their work but argued that Buckmaster’s claim was untrue.