OpenAI recently announced a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize challenges established by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. Each problem carries a $1 million prize, though the Institute requires a two-year period of general acceptance before confirming a solution.
The company utilized roughly 10,000 agents and tens of millions of dollars in compute resources to achieve the result in 88 hours. OpenAI researcher Sébastien Bubeck reportedly offered mathematician Tristan Buckmaster unlimited compute and sole authorship of the paper if he excluded his collaborator, Levent Alpöge, who is affiliated with Anthropic.
Buckmaster rejected the offer and raised concerns regarding whether his use of OpenAI’s Codex tool contributed to the model's success. OpenAI denied that user data influenced the training, though it previously acknowledged it could not rule out that data derived from product usage helped improve the model.
The situation follows a separate incident involving Andreas Thom and Gábor Kun, whose research was used in an OpenAI mathematical breakthrough. The company quietly updated its announcement to credit the pair after they raised concerns. Thom noted that OpenAI has not clarified if interactions with ChatGPT influenced the model's development.
