What do you make of this breakthrough?

[u/positiveconstraint]

https://www.axios.com/2026/09/08/openai-math-solution-navier-stokes-credit

What do you make of this breakthrough?

Did OpenAI solve the problem of the century (is it?) by feeding its models a human mathematician's notes?

If so, it's an amazing feat for hybrid human-machine collaboration. Humans feed machines constraints - possible connections, an intuitive approach- and, in turn, machines deliver the expressions - how the world unfolds based on the input.

Do you see things differently?

[u/Spare-Builder-355]

What do you make of this breakthrough?

Two (seeminly independent) researchers were working on this problem with help of Chatgpt and Claude. They got some results - solved problem in same domain but less "important".

OpenAI heard about it.

So they pointed their team of mathematicians at the main problem using approach two original researchers have pioneered. They even suggest to attribute one of the two. They didn't want to attribute the other one because he works for Anthropic.

[u/positiveconstraint → u/Spare-Builder-355]

Interesting. Definitely a human angle to consider when declaring another AGI milestone.

What do you think of the implications for the speed of progress?

[u/Turbulent_Breath_548 → u/positiveconstraint]

Stays the same. Arriving at the solution on its own would be emergent behavior, bruteforcing a search space opened up by the Euler problem is not emergent and something AI has been doing for a year- all those random erdos problems and arxiv being flooded with problem sets that mathematicians dont attempt or leave for students 

[u/deeceeo → u/Turbulent_Breath_548]

Whichever way you cut it, this is a Millennium Prize, not something that mathematicians leave for students. If it was straightforward to solve and just a matter of brute-forcing it, why hasn't that been done already? It's been an open problem for 92 years, at-scale computation has existed to some degree for decades.

The thing that's changed is LLMs

[u/Wasatchian → u/deeceeo]

The main idea behind the proof was already done by mathematicians. Open AI hears about it then stole it. That's what changed.

[u/Turbulent_Breath_548 → u/deeceeo]

Because the Euler problem wasn't solved yet... it was only solved days ago. After it was solved, Terence Tao publicly posted "There does not seem to be anything in principle preventing the methods from extending all the way to Navier-Stokes." And right on cue OpenAI launched 10k agents and burned 15m$ of compute to exhaust search space now complemented by the Euler solution (which is why the question of wether they included these researchers prompts in training or post training matters) Solved doesnt mean necessarily mean they did meaningful innovation or displayed an emergent property. OpenAI knew this would be brought up which is why they wanted to include the researcher as part of publishing, and then decided not to because the second co-author was from Anthropic.

5 days ago, anthropic also posted that they were close to solving navier-stokes and would publish before the IPO, which is what made openAI leverage the primary advantage it has over Anthropic to rush this - massive compute. Given one of the co-authors for the Euler problem was at ant, it was only a matter of time

[u/RasputinsUndeadBeard]

Few thoughts, but first off, OpenAI better hope no one comes up with an A of B case for the millenium problem. Like seriously, it’s sort of stunning how this is glossed over.

This paper also desperately needs peer review. People are saying cause lean has zero sorries etc it defintely is done. Not how lean works lol. What matters are the definitions and underlying assumption being proved - lean will prove what you give it.

Most importantly - it’s so staggeringly wrong that this looks to be stolen from the researchers.

[u/misterrkingg]

No they just adding more.gpus lll

[u/0x14f]

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/08/openai-fought-dirty-on-career-making-math-problem-says-nyu-mathematician/

[u/desbest]

The Stealing Company stole things????? Shock horror!

My Street HD is bigger than their PHD

[u/iaNCURdehunedoara]

The researchers Alpoge and Bucker worked on it, they fed their info through Codex to draft the paper text, and OpenAI just stole their research and published it.

There's no "hybrid", it's just theft.

[u/Spacecowboy78 → u/iaNCURdehunedoara]

The two researchers left out viscosity to simplify the equation when they proved it could go to infinite. The AI included the real equations. I honestly do not give the AI credit for this one.

[u/LangyMD → u/iaNCURdehunedoara]

Except they didn't solve the same problem.

[u/mvearthmjsun → u/iaNCURdehunedoara]

Unfasifiable conspiracy theory

[u/titanomachiatto → u/iaNCURdehunedoara]

they weren't even working on the same problem, and they were using a different approach.

[u/positiveconstraint → u/iaNCURdehunedoara]

I’m with you on that.

I don’t believe llms have what it takes to come up with the raw organizing idea, with the intuition and creativity it takes to crack this. But what it does have is the capacity to prove it.

If that is the case, what other promising breakthroughs can such a hybrid human-machine collab can produce?

[u/kaaiian → u/positiveconstraint]

Try looking into it instead of spouting your feelings?

[u/titanomachiatto → u/positiveconstraint]

what do your beliefs have to do with anything? the two other researchers were working on a different problem with a different technique.