OpenAI's Math Tactics Alarm Researchers — SkimNews
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- OpenAI said it solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem using roughly 10,000 agents, tens of millions of dollars in compute, and just 88 hours — the first breakthrough of its kind since the Poincaré conjecture in the prize's 25-year history.
- Tristan Buckmaster (NYU) and Levent Alpöge (Anthropic) were pursuing the same problem when OpenAI researcher Sébastien Bubeck offered Buckmaster "unlimited compute" and sole authorship of a paper — but only if he excluded Alpöge; Buckmaster rejected what he called a "bribe."
- Bubeck told The New York Times he had made similar arrangements with other unnamed mathematicians and that OpenAI could not run "an internal OpenAI project with an Anthropic employee" — confirming the competitive calculus behind the push.
- OpenAI spokesperson Laurance Fauconnet categorically denied that Buckmaster's Codex prompts could have influenced the system, though the company had earlier acknowledged it could not rule out data from his product use improving the model.
- Andreas Thom (TU Dresden) said OpenAI built heavily on work by him and Gábor Kun for a separate result, then quietly amended its announcement to credit them without publicly disclosing the change; he now suspects their ChatGPT conversations may have helped train the solving model.
- More than a dozen mathematicians told The Verge that frontier mathematics runs on elegance, discovery, and accumulated lineage — values Buckmaster said are invisible to a tech culture where "prestige, fame, being first" is "the only currency."
Why it matters: OpenAI's Navier-Stokes push — reportedly driven partly by rivalry with Anthropic researcher Alpöge — has Buckmaster and Thom questioning whether their Codex and ChatGPT use fed the models that solved problems they spent years on. OpenAI offered Buckmaster sole authorship if he cut ties with Alpöge — a deal he called a "bribe."
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