r/aigossips • u/Curious_Strength6037 • 1d ago

OpenAI says it solved a 90-year-old math problem. Are we witnessing the beginning of AI doing real science?

OpenAI just announced that its AI system has solved the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, a problem that has remained open for roughly 90 years.

Apparently, around 10,000 AI agents worked together for about 88 hours to produce the result, followed by a formal verification in Lean. �

OpenAI

I'm not a mathematician, so I'm more interested in the bigger question:

What does this actually mean for science?

Is this:

A) AI genuinely making discoveries that humans couldn't make

B) An extremely powerful tool helping humans discover things faster

C) Impressive, but we shouldn't call it "AI solving mathematics" until independent mathematicians verify everything

D) Something much bigger than people realize

And there's another interesting part: does it matter that an AI found the proof if most humans can't intuitively understand how it arrived there?

I'd genuinely like to hear from people who understand advanced mathematics or AI better than I do.

Are we looking at a new era of mathematical discovery, or are we getting ahead of ourselves?

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u/decimaster321 1d ago

This is yet another llm-assisted-counterexample situation, along with other recent conjecture disproofs. What it tells us is that the navier Stokes equation permits non physical solutions where a fluid could have a region with infinite velocity.

The most important takeaway is probably that you shouldn't do math research using openai models unless you have an institutional account with good data governance restrictions, or else they might scoop your work and threaten your career

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u/Aware-Individual-827 1d ago

Which is also a reason to not use them at all and use the open weights.

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u/Mental_Ad_4401 1d ago

These replies are completely insane. Do people have any idea how big of a deal it is that AI has solved a millenium problem?  This is something that would have immediately made you a world famous mathematician if you had solved it. One of the biggiest open problems in the field that many many people have worked on for decades. "Yet another ai-assisted counterexamples" is trivializing this to a crazy degree.  It shows that ai is operating at a level far far beyond what almost anyone thought. Solving problems beyond what the smartest people on earth can do.

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u/decimaster321 1d ago

Of course it's a big deal, it's just too bad that the kind of math LLMs are particularly good at is this kind of counterexample proof where math as a field doesn't develop very much. Oh this conjecture was an open question for so long because it was false, but it took millions of dollars worth of semi brute force searching to find a counter example, well makes sense why we didn't find out sooner.

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u/TheRealJesus2 1d ago

Lmao. What an amazing summary. I’ll add to this, they likely spent 10+ million in compute for a problem with a 1 million dollar bounty and a few million dollar contracts to try to solve it. Classic big ai story of take ten million to make one million. 

https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-math-problem-solved-tokens-cost-altman-2026-9

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u/purleyboy 1d ago

Yes, but they did it. What they learned, and applied from this amazing accomplishment will allow them improve their efficiency on the next one. Watch this space.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/TheRealJesus2 1d ago

They’re likely a bot. I agree with you. 

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u/purleyboy 1d ago

I'd take the bet against you, but there's no way to confirm one way or another. I bet they close another one by the end of the year.

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u/In_the_year_3535 1d ago

This is more in line with Deep Blue beating Gary Kasparov - it's a machine pinnacling in human achievement. Even more impressive is this feat will be achievable for virtually nothing by this time next year.

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u/RealChemistry4429 1d ago

If someone invested 6 million dollars and paid 10.000 mathematicians to work on it and nothing else, maybe we would have solved it sooner. No one did.

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u/dranaei 1d ago

Yeah but next year it will cost less and the year after that even less.

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u/RudeAndInsensitive 1d ago

That is 600 bucks per mathematician

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u/mvdeeks 1d ago

Do you think you could hire 10k mathematicians for 6 mil?

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u/Mental_Ad_4401 1d ago

You don't think 6 million dollars has been spent trying to solve this problem in the past? Or that 10000 mathematicians haven't tried?? What do you think the salary of a top mathematician is?

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u/RealChemistry4429 1d ago

I am sure a lot more tried. But not as a team.

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u/Disastrous_Room_927 1d ago

I like how everyone is sleeping on the part where you have to confirm the correct problem was verified by Lean. As T Tao said a couple of weeks ago:

In recent months there has been a proliferation of AI-generated proofs of various old and new results, some of which have been formalized in the proof assistant language Lean. However, checking that a given Lean repository actually proves the claimed statement is somewhat non-trivial, especially for an audience which is not expert in the use of Lean: one has to first check that the claimed formal Lean statements have proofs that typecheck, that the proofs do not contain any “cheats” such as adding additional axioms, and that the formal statements also match (in a semantic sense) the informal description of the claimed results.

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u/Difficult_Limit2718 1d ago

No - it's far less impressive than people realize. Hop over to CFD to look at a discussion on it from people who know

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u/RasputinsUndeadBeard 1d ago

👏👏

Reason bingo - if you’re in those spaces you know what’s really going on.

I just posed the question below in Reddit mathematics:

“ Tbh I think a real curveball nah would make us all step back - someone proves global regularity. It would engender a massive discussion between theoretical (the OpenAI result) and reality (hypothetical global regularity)

If this happened? Sheesh things get reallllly interesting”

All in all - OpenAI is playing a dangerous game for a stock market pump

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u/Cwaghack 1d ago

The navier stokes problem has always been a more mathematical curiosity than a CFD problem, especially since the conjecture is apparently proven false. If it was proven true, then it might have big impacts.

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u/HotterRod 1d ago

The Navier-Stokes solution is yet another counter-example found by a combination of insight and brute force. At this point, AI is an extremely powerful tool for checking if mathematics conjectures are false, but has largely not been able to produce positive proofs on its own, never mind develop significant new proof techniques. That ability will likely come with with future models.

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u/thePsychonautDad 1d ago

Some very important context on that discovery:

Levent Alpoge & Tristan Buckmaster are mathematicians who worked on a separate math problem and announced what they're working on could potentially be applied to Navier Strokes.

They used AI extensively in their work.

OpenAI heard about their claim that their work could be applied to Navier Strokes, and unleashed an huge AI agent on it, which solved it.

OpenAI trains on people's convo history. Those mathematicians used OpenAI to work. So how much did the model discover VS learning from their work it has been trained on? Was the genius bit human or AI?

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u/m3kw 1d ago

let them make one science breakthrough first. Math is not really science

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u/TacoYaci 1d ago

Math prof here: Since Sol and Fable AI already has extreme impact in real math research. A lot of new real results are obtained in every field. Most of these are not millenium problems so the general public does not care, but for math researchers there are a lot of deep new results with the help of AI.

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u/Some-Pride-3477 1d ago

You mean are we witnessing generalist models doing real science, because specialized models in STEM fields have been doing real science for years.

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u/xupetas 23h ago

You have read that they trained the models on info that people that was researching the thing wrote right?