OpenAI's experimental artificial intelligence model has reportedly solved the Navier-Stokes problem, considered one of the most complex problems in mathematics.
Modern.az reports that, according to the company, approximately 10,000 AI agents worked on solving the problem for 88 hours. The results obtained were then verified over an additional 17 hours.
However, this claim has already sparked controversy. Tristan Bakmaster, a mathematician and professor at New York University, suspects that OpenAI may have reached this result by using his and Anthropic employee Levent Alpege's unpublished research. According to Bakmaster, he has been working on related mathematical problems with Alpege for about a year. They uploaded drafts of their research to Claude and OpenAI's Codex program.
The mathematician claims that after OpenAI learned of their potential scientific achievement, it began to use the same rare approach. Bakmaster also stated that OpenAI researcher Sebastien Bubeck suggested removing Alpege from the list of authors of the research because Alpege works at Anthropic. When Bakmaster disagreed with this suggestion and decided to make the conversation public, he claims he was told, "Why do you want to destroy your career?"
OpenAI, however, denies that the mathematicians' unpublished work was seen by the company's employees or AI agents.
Nevertheless, the company has not completely ruled out the possibility that anonymized data collected from users' use of its products could influence the training of models. Bakmaster himself emphasized that he does not know whether data from their research with Alpege was used. The "Millennium Problems" include seven of the most challenging problems in mathematics. The Clay Mathematics Institute has offered a $1 million prize for the solution to each of these problems.
Currently, the Navier-Stokes problem is still listed as an unsolved problem on the institute's official website. Of these seven problems, only the Poincaré conjecture has been solved so far. Its proof was presented by Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman.
