OpenAI Denies Buckmaster's Navier-Stokes Theft Claim — SkimNews
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- Tristan Buckmaster alleged OpenAI learned of his collaborative work with Levent Alpöge on the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem and used an internal model to solve it.
- OpenAI's Sebastien Bubeck denied the allegations on X as 'false and inflammatory,' saying he entered the discussion 'following academic norms' and that academic standards 'are of the highest importance' to him.
- Buckmaster stored his research notes in OpenAI's Codex product, per Wccftech, making the data-access question central rather than hypothetical.
- Buckmaster likened the AI's Navier-Stokes breakthrough to IBM's Deep Blue defeating Garry Kasparov in 1997, underscoring the milestone framing.
- Dheeraj Nagaraj, a former intern under Bubeck in 2020, wrote that the allegations of 'unscrupulous behavior' were '100% believable' and hoped Bubeck would not 'weasel out of this.'
- Buckmaster and Alpöge publicly released three results alongside Buckmaster's statement on his NYU page, putting their own work in the open even as the dispute over OpenAI's parallel progress continued.
Why it matters: The allegation strikes at whether AI labs can be trusted with private researcher data stored in their own products — a concrete access question because Buckmaster's notes lived in Codex, not in some external system. OpenAI's denial via Bubeck is directly contradicted by a former intern's endorsement of the allegations, sharpening a credibility fight that other Millennium Prize researchers will be watching closely.
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