Professor Tristan Buckmaster of NYU and Levent Alpöge from Anthropic announced three proofs, including a preliminary finding on the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem. This problem is one of the seven Millennium Prize problems, which offer a $1 million bounty from the Clay Mathematics Institute for a solution.
Buckmaster alleges that OpenAI attempted to 'fight dirty' to claim the first formal proof. He claims that after OpenAI learned of their progress, the company used its massive computing resources to reach a solution first, using the same uncommon approach that Buckmaster and Alpöge had chosen.
Buckmaster further alleges that Sebastian Bubeck, who leads OpenAI's mathematical research, suggested he remove Levent Alpöge's credit from the research. He also claims Bubeck threatened his career if he made the dispute public.
Sebastian Bubeck denied the claims, calling them 'false and inflammatory' and stating that he followed academic norms. The dispute also raises concerns about whether OpenAI used Codex interactions to train models that then assisted their own team in solving the problem.