OpenAI Just Claimed a Huge Math Discovery. Some Academics Are Crying Foul

A landmark announcement by the frontier AI lab has been overshadowed by accusations of impropriety. OpenAI said today that it has found an AI-generated solution to one of the biggest problems in mathematics --a 200-year-old equation that describes the natural behavior of fluids like water and air. The announcement appears to demonstrate the stunning power for AI to advance mathematics. But it has been marred by claims from another mathematician, Tristan Buckmaster, who says that OpenAI rushed ahead to solve the problem after learning of his and another mathematician's progress on the problem, and also then tried to influence who got credit for the work. The proof concerns the Navier-Stokes equation, one of the unsolved problems in the Clay Millennium prizes, which are each worth $1 million.