OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem, says NYU mathematician — SkimNews
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- Tristan Buckmaster (NYU) and Levent Alpöge (Anthropic) announced three proofs Tuesday on the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem — one of seven Clay Mathematics Institute Millennium Prize problems, each carrying a $1 million bounty.
- Buckmaster alleges that after information about his progress reached OpenAI, the company deployed 'an entire team' with 'an insane amount of compute,' and that the first prompt was sent only after his work had reached them.
- Sebastian Bubeck, who leads OpenAI's mathematical research, called Buckmaster's claims 'false and inflammatory,' said he followed academic norms, and promised a more complete statement.
- Buckmaster alleges Bubeck asked him to remove Alpöge's credit from the announcement — citing Alpöge's affiliation with rival Anthropic — and later warned: 'Why would you ruin your career?' followed by 'If you don't want me to be nice, then I don't have to be nice.'
- OpenAI reserves the right to train models on Codex interactions, and Buckmaster flagged the possibility that a Codex model trained on his own work could have regurgitated his approach when solving the problem; OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment on this.
- The tactic Buckmaster and Alpöge used — a 'smooth force' approach (Fefferman's options c and d) — was, per Buckmaster, being pursued by 'almost nobody,' making OpenAI's simultaneous identical path the core of his suspicion.
Why it matters: Buckmaster's allegation that OpenAI used his leaked progress — and possibly Codex interactions he himself generated — to outspend him on the same proof puts a sharp edge on conflicts around AI labs' compute advantages, training-on-user-prompt practices, and academic credit norms. With a $1 million Millennium Prize at stake, the dispute tests whether OpenAI's incentive to claim a historic math result collides with the integrity of the researchers whose approach it allegedly mirrored.
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