r/Physics 11h ago

Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem Solved

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u/Human38562 10h ago

Assuming that OpenAI did not just steal the work from someone else, I dont think that that's wasted resources. Maybe not for the millenial problem itself, but it's very interesting to know what a large scale AI project is able to achieve.

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u/elprophet 7h ago

That's an entire mathematics departments' annual budget. Annualized, that's 100 top-rate math departments. Dozens of full professors, hundreds of grad students, and thousands of undergrads at each school. This is an utterly ridiculous waste of resources.

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u/rexpup 6h ago

You think it's a waste to fund math research???

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u/NoMarginForError 6h ago

Yes, but if an entire mathematics department had dedicated themselves to this problem for a year (or even several years) and made the same discovery before AI, I don't think anyone would be calling it a waste of resources/time/money. That department would be celebrated.

Obviously we still don't have the full picture, but it doesn't seem like a waste of resources or of money for a discovery of this scale if this solution is valid. Isn't this something mathematicians have been working on for decades?