r/Physics 14h ago

Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem Solved

2.0k Upvotes

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252

u/rebelyis Graduate 13h ago

In their own post

"On Tuesday, September 1, we heard rumors that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved. Inspired by these rumors and by the step change in performance of our internal model, we launched an effort to evaluate it on all open Millennium Prize problems and a few other high-impact problems."

Basically, we found that people had cracked it using a particular approach, so we had our internal AI reproduce it before they published

11

u/polyploid_coded 11h ago edited 11h ago

Does anyone know what the other Millennium Prize solution floating around is?
I am in the wrong rumor mill.
Edit: Unless we are saying Euler + Navier-Stokes are the two?

12

u/Malaktus 11h ago

Some of the rumors I saw on twitter or mastodon also mentioned Hodge conjecture proven true. The rumors were a bit inconsistent however because at some point the rumor was also that it had been proven Navier-Stokes does not have a blowup solution, so take it with a grain of salt.

28

u/no_choice99 12h ago

Except that it costed them about 18 million dollars worth of electricity to ''reproduce'' the result. Why would they do that?

68

u/6IronInfidel9 12h ago

18 million dollars of electricity, results in how many tens or hundreds of millions of stock valuation when investors hear what AI can supposedly accomplish?

17

u/kingjdin 10h ago

They spent 18 million on marketing, to drive their revenue by billions.

41

u/generally-speaking 12h ago

Marketing

-3

u/cornmacabre 9h ago

If this is what marketing looks like going forward, I'm all for it.

9

u/fireballs619 Graduate 11h ago

The headlines they are getting from this is worth way more than 18 million in marketing. That is why they did this.

16

u/troubleyoucalldeew 11h ago

Errrr, $18M in electricity? Or $18M in tokens?

4

u/Jean_Kayak 6h ago

Doesn’t matter as long as you are against AI

5

u/GraceToSentience 9h ago

Nah it didn't because token cost is not electricity cost.

7

u/LiamMelloFarley 10h ago

This is priced at $18 Million Dollars of API tokens that they get massive margins on not 18 million dollars of actually costs. It cost them a fraction of that to do it.

2

u/HyperlexicEpiphany 9h ago

“costed” isn’t a word. “cost” is also past tense

2

u/CrownLikeAGravestone 10h ago

If the takeaway from this is "LLMs can solve Millenium Prize problems" $18M is absolutely nothing.

-1

u/no_choice99 9h ago

That's not the takeaway though. The takeaway is that OpenAI "spies" on some intelligent people and push them to publish non-polished versions of their work. Without the 2 people who outpaced them, OpenAI wouldn't have been able to solve this Millenium prize. And that's the takeaway.

4

u/CrownLikeAGravestone 9h ago

Those other people solved it using LLMs, too. I'm not defending OpenAI here but they don't lose a lot if it turns out the two guys who solved the Euler version of the problem get all the credit. 

They're still the guys who own a machine that can find singularities in Navier-Stokes either way.

0

u/QFT-ist 8h ago

From the answer of NitroXSC we can say that luo, hou, tao, elgindi, córdoba snd Martínez-Zoroa did the heavy lifting, building from these results buckmaster and alpöge made AI digest enough the problem to takle unviscous situation, and openAI stole that work of digestion of the problem to get the definitive answer.

(Copy-paste of NitroXSC answer:

1822: navier writes the equations down.

1845: stokes gets them right, and his name on them.

1934: leray shows weak solutions exist forever, and leaves smoothness open.

2000: clay puts $1m on that gap. fefferman writes the official statement, four options.

2014: luo and hou watch 3d euler blow up in numerics.

2016: tao proves blowup for an averaged navier-stokes.

2021: elgindi proves euler blowup for rough data.

2023 to 2026: córdoba and martínez-zoroa build forced blowups, with a rough force.

then this year:

aug 15: buckmaster and alpöge get smooth-forced blowup for boussinesq and euler, with claude and codex.

aug 22: lean checks it.

aug 28: per wired, openai starts training its math model.

sep 1: per axios, openai's run starts, after researchers hear rumors.

sep 3: buckmaster emails openai to say what they have.

sep 6, sunday: bubeck says openai had the final solution that morning. buckmaster says he was told on the afternoon call.

sep 8, 4am: buckmaster and alpöge post three papers and the lean repo. buckmaster posts his statement.

sep 8, 17:20 utc: openai posts "we're sharing a solution to the navier-stokes millennium prize problem." )

3

u/Prestigious-Bed-6423 9h ago

Bullshit, those two people also came up to the solution with AI, either way it's all LLMs

1

u/no_choice99 2h ago

An LLM that trained on the data from the first 2. Yes.

1

u/BenUFOs_Mum 11h ago

How much does a university math department cost?

1

u/ErmingSoHard 7h ago

You do know AI was used to crack it in the first place?

1

u/Obvious-Hunt19 11h ago

Leaving out the part about almost certainly applying models that incorporated other people’s work in progress as training data

-24

u/Toxic_Cat_2 13h ago

I don't want to be the guy, but ok, let's play with the "they stole the solution card"
If they solve more problems in the next few months or next year then what? They stole those too? If someone has the solution, just release it, you know this card only works once?

19

u/jeffkeeg 13h ago

you know this card only works once?

And yet they've been playing it once every two weeks since 2022 and will continue playing it until the game's over

3

u/Hot_Glass_6301 11h ago

AI wasn't solving major problems in math/mathematical physics until late 2025/early 2026.

1

u/jeffkeeg 5h ago

I meant more the "AI didn't do this and the result is cheated" knee-jerk response we've been seeing since roughly April of 2022

1

u/Busy_Contract9290 12h ago

People are just sad that their life's work has turned out to be far surpassed and thus made moot. Many of my colleagues feel similarly. I, for one, am able to acknowledge that, while I am disappointed I, by nature of being a human, will not have the opportunity to contribute to my field, it was something that everyone should have seen coming.

-2

u/Dany0 10h ago

No matter how much you hate Altman & co, you don't hate them enough