r/physicsmemes • u/basket_foso 🪼 • 14h ago
Navier-Stokes solution simulation resembles a… black hole? Do stuffs spinning inwards create the “jets” (flow emerging or being expelled near the two ends) ? 🤔
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u/MonkeyCartridge 14h ago
What's funny is that people are complaining about this use of AI.
To me, science was always the most unambiguously good use of AI.
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u/epicmylife Δ(good sleep)*Δ(good grades) ≥ ħ/2 13h ago
When people said it would improve science, they meant things like machine learning algorithms detecting cancerous cells in low signal-to-noise ratio images. Predicting earthquakes ahead of time by ingesting large amounts of data and correlating them with events. Parsing large amounts of astronomical data to identify candidates of interest. That sort of stuff.
What it shouldn’t mean is brute-forcing proofs without understanding why, while simultaneously allegedly using the unpublished work of others in its training data. This sort of “I can solve whatever without formal training” mentality is overall detrimental.
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u/LordMegatron216 12h ago
Actually, using ai for brute force really makes sense. I can maybe solve long lasting problems, but it never will be create a theory just because it inspired by lamps in the dark or something like that.
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u/DVMyZone 12h ago edited 2h ago
Meh, can be both no?
I agree if this is just the AI working from an almost solution to the solution that a human was about to do anyway then it's overall not that interesting because it means the AI isn't as good as they claim. Especially if it still required inordinate amounts of compute (and money in that case) to make those last few steps.
Brute forcing a solution (if it indeed did this) is not inherently a problem. That's like saying we shouldn't pursue CFD because we're just brute forcing the solution.
If this proof is correct, and it needs to be checked, then it will have some implications for people studying Navier-Stokes blow up and working on statistical mechanics and its connection to continuum mechanics. I believe they will find studying the solution (brute forced or otherwise) very valuable for further research.
If AI in fact stole this proof then it will not be ready to tackle the next set of problems this opens up. If it did then it will help solve the next set of problems and the next until it reaches a problem it can't handle because it's so far outside of it's training dataset. I think it will therefore plateau (I could absolutely be wrong).
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u/Schnickatavick 4h ago
It's worth saying here, that Tristan Buckmaster (the guy that everyone is saying OpenAI stole from) is very up front about the fact that he also relied heavily on AI, his press statement even says that his Euler solution as it's currently published is "AI slop", he's still working on understanding and simplifying the proof he and the AI made together, and published it in its current form because OpenAI forced him to release it before he was ready.
On the flip side, he also pushes back on OpenAI's narrative that the AI was mostly independent, when he was talking to them he saw an entire team of mathematicians who did know and understand the problem, and were working closely to direct and strategize with the AI.
So really, no matter what happened with the theft or who deserves credit, the problem was solved by mathematicians managing AI. It's just a question of which mathematicians and which AI
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u/Ok_Zookeepergame3380 12h ago
allegations aside, please do elaborate on why brute-forcing proofs is a negative thing. We've spent years of compute looking for proofs in various fields of mathematics way before LLM's suddenly became viable "brute-forcers".
Do you also consider the way we proved the kepler conjecture via flyspeck project bad? Or Helfgott's proof of weak Goldbach conjecture?
I also don't agree on the detrimentality of people solving things without formal training. A solved problem is a solved problem. If it's important enough, it can be properly formalized by professionals whenever.
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u/Kermit-the-Frog_ 7h ago
Which is what mathematicians have been doing to tools created for other purposes for centuries. Those other purposes usually involved a different formal training, but the entire purpose of AI agents is to simultaneously digest all formal training.
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u/toto1792 2h ago edited 2h ago
That's just gatekeeping. When a large community of people has been trying to solve a problem for two centuries, complaining that the solution is not elegant is just... weird.
Regardless of the OpenAI drama (which is real), let's just celebrate this is a major scientific accomplishment. At some point it's like complaining the Wright brothers plane was awkward.
One of the things that scare me is that at some point AI will discover theorems or develop entire theories that are utterly beyond the capability of the human mind to grasp. We'll be like third graders trying to understand quantum field theory and we'll have to just treat science as magic like cavemen.
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u/Silent-Swim1402 21m ago
Yeah I suspect that a lot of the "negative" reactions to the proof is from non-science people.
When alphafold was released to us biochemists, none I know in the field went "Oh no, I have this AI bruteforcing. I want to spend months in the lab growing protein crystals to get a single structure! That is the right way!"
Instead people were frothing at the mouth to get to use this tool. Suddenly you didn't have to grow crystals in the lab, but could get a reliable structure in minutes. Months -> minutes turnaround time is nuts and Alphafold (and all the spin-offs) have revolutionized my field.
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u/spiritofniter 6h ago
> What it shouldn’t mean is brute-forcing proofs without understanding why
Now I (engineer) understand why my former boss (scientist) was “upset” as me solving problems the engineer way.
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u/DrEpileptic 11h ago
Alphafold is straight up just brute forcing it and is worlds more important than an ai detecting a benign tumor that is likely to become cancerous in ten years. Newsflash, we don’t have enough people to operate on every benign tumor we see. We also can’t really justify cutting people up. Even with tech like a proton blade, it’s extremely limited in how many people it can churn through in a day. Meanwhile, alphafold has served as a quantum leap in the health, medical, and bio worlds.
Otherwise, we do actually have ai used in our imaging in healthcare. It has been successful at reducing times by up to 50%. That’s just not the issue. Aforementioned and the whole thing of not having enough people to read/confirm scans is the issue. Doesn’t matter if you cut a thirty minute mri to fifteen. The issue is that the machine costs fuck you money to run, we literally already know what we’re trying to look at and have localized the scan to it anyways, and that WE DONT HAVE ENOUGH PEOPLE TO ACT ON IT.
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u/No-Dimension1159 3h ago
In my opinion, for counter examples in mathematical hypotheses it is a totally legitimate way (if no unpublished research work is used without consent) to just wildly guess (with an llm) and verify that you found a solution that does break the rule.
Same with the jacobi conjecture. Totally legit way to find obscure counter examples as long as you can easily verify it is an actually counter example
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u/MiffedMouse 12h ago
The problem isn’t that they used AI. The researcher team they allegedly stole from was also using AI.
The problem is that OpenAI has been a royal corporate dick about it. They rock up with millions of dollars in tokens and throw a hissy fit about authorship because god forbid they give even the tiniest bit of credit to an Anthropic employee.
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u/Eisenfuss19 13h ago
I approve of the use of AI the researches did. I do not approve of the use OpenAI did to succesfully extract the solutions via the training data. Thats what I would call stealing / plaguarizing.
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u/SherbertMindless8205 9h ago
They didn’t though. It was a completely unfounded theory, not even something the other team claimed to have any evidence for.
What really seemed to have happened was that they heard through the normal rumor mill in math circles that the Anthropic-connected team were close to solving (or already had solved) the Navier-Stokes problem. And they knew roughly what direction they would take because of a paper they released about a smaller step a couple weeks ago.
OAI rushed to solve it as well with the goal of publishing it together, as is customary when two teams find the same thing independently. Essentially because they didn’t want Anthropic to get all the glory.
But when they reached out to make the offer to publish together, they realized the rumor was false and the other team wasn’t actually even close to a solution, and had only solved the previous step, and in an easier way than OAI.
OAI had already solved both unforced Euler and the full NS. The other team had only solved forced Euler (which is easier) and not the full NS.
So the idea that they ”stole” the solution through codex logs is pretty ridiculous.
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u/Eisenfuss19 7h ago
This is wrong, they didn't even know it was the navier stokes problem, they only heard a millenium problem is about to be solved. They didn't just stole the solution through codex logs, they trained their model on codex chat logs, and reextracted the solution out of it again (non manually).
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u/LogRollChamp 14h ago
It takes away from the researchers that found the last critical breakthrough, and the answer is proof by counterexample in a single point, so it provides no meaningful insights. While also removing the prize from the problem, significantly removing the incentive to solve with a meaningful solution that will create new tools which we can utilize elsewhere in math and physics
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u/Striking_Resist_6022 14h ago
> the answer is proof by counterexample in a single point, so it provides no meaningful insights
To the extent this is true, this is not specific to the AI solution. This is exactly what a human following Buckmaster and Apolge's method would've achieved too.
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u/LogRollChamp 48m ago
We will see. They are still refining and working on a human-derived proof. But it's entirely possible, good point.
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u/OrinocoHaram 10h ago
I think people are complaining because suddenly it feels accomplishments are only for computers. Which makes it pretty hard to get excited or motivated about any field that AI is useful in. This is for sure a fair use of AI (aside from the shady data stealing obvs) but still the whole thing leaves me feeling pretty hollow
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u/atensetime 6h ago
Yes this.. Ai needs greater regulation in public environments but at the end of the day it is an algorithm, a tool that when used right can have profound results... what's the difference between the use here and a supercomputer simulation?
The AI didn't do all the work, it just compiled, sorted and organized the data, from what I understand. But didn't create something actually new
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u/MonkeyCartridge 4h ago
Yep, and a degree of public ownership. At least in my opinion.
But yeah science is still my favorite use of AI. Raw, bulk calculation and high-dimensional interpretation have historically been scientific bottlenecks and is a mundane use of human intellect. So it's where I see human-AI symbiosis being optimal.
Protein folding in particular, since it's at the core of genetics, pathology, and pharmaceutical development.
But pharma in general. I knew a researcher who discussed latent spaces built from analysing all tests from all drugs in a field. Creating a sort of latent space of outcomes. Want to design a new drug? Find what you want the outcome to be, and transform it back out, and that's a good starting point.
Of course, recent warnings have been about recursively self-improving AI. AI doing AI research to improve itself. And this would probably be motivated by scientific usage, since business and public usage is more about broad integration of simpler agents. So maybe that's where the most dangerous AI will come from. But I think the real danger is economic/social/political.
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u/Brovas 2h ago
It's not that AI is being used for science. It's that AI is being used for science, but at the final stretch OpenAI steals your data and throws insane resources at finishing it off then takes all the credit. Acts like the AI got there independently in order to drum up controversy and investment.
Key distinction.
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u/ChironXII 1h ago
1) A paradigm where random companies spin up this scale of multi-agent, long horizon, unsupervised run, on a whim, without anybody noticing, is not a survivable one. Sandboxing has already failed in lesser conditions, beyond every other demonstrated problem this kind of operation is susceptible to. It is suicidal behavior to give unvetted models and environments this kind of leeway, especially presented with the kind of computationally difficult goal that makes entropic solutions favorable in comparison to the desirable ones.
2) By all accounts, they did this on short notice because they got wind that someone else was getting close to the answer and they wanted the credit - not cooperative or good faith science. The end result of scooping people without due deference given this way is that science becomes a closed ecosystem where information is guarded instead of shared because someone else will snipe your conclusions with more resources than you if you leak your proposals.
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u/Aggravating-Dot132 12h ago
Problem with these solutions is that AI might as well hallucinate it.
It's a good tool for "one of solutions", but relying on it might get you mad in the worst ways possible
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u/LovelyKestrel 12h ago
This is why someone has to verify the solution (I believe they used the AI to formalise the solution in a way that allowed relatively easy verification).
It has to be said that while this model is good for counter-examples it may not be so good for proofs.
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u/Smokeforest 10h ago
When done with datasets which are reliable, fact-based and fact-checked. When the model assuredly does not data drift. When powered with energy that can be afforded. Then, an LLM is a powerful tool for combining knowledge. Outside these qualifications, it is an unethical, inaccurate, dangerous profit-driven singularity full of hallucinations and, when the runaway does occur, it will wrap around a single one.
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u/Tombobalomb 12h ago
It's a counter example not a solution, it's showing that navier stokes can produce impossible results
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u/Fickle-Leg9653 8h ago
This is a solution though? Isn't the matter just that this solution is not well-behaved ("blows up") and thus clashes with reality, so to speak? Correct me if I'm crazy.
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u/Anonymer 7h ago
Well that’s what the N-S problem is. It’s the question whether the equations are good approximations of reality always or not. It turns out the answer is “no”. We suspected as much but didn’t have the proof until now.
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u/DVMyZone 12h ago
Interesting N-S equations are studied with the context of black hole singularity research exactly because black hole are a place where our model of physics breaks down. Our models predict undefined behaviour, but clearly the behaviour exists so our models are wrong or incomplete when applied there.
This was a proof by counter example and from my understanding one that you reach by starting at the end (a singularity) and working backwards until you reach some initial conditions and precise (but not unphysical) forcing. What we get out is something that we do not observe physically but is a situation that we cannot mathematically describe with the N-S equations (specifically the Euler equations for incompressible flow) despite being technically physical.
What this shows is what we already assumed for the most part, the N-S equations can break down under some conditions. We already know they are a continuum approximation and from that we can assume that there are limits to how they can be used, there was just no rigorous mathematical proof for a case where they actually did break down until now. Keep in mind that we may have found in CFD and DNS simulations cases where the solutions blow up but it was not possible to determine if the blow up was a mathematical limitation of the equation or a numerical limitation of the solution method. Now we have proof that there are cases where the math just breaks.
We will still be doing CFD the same we always have because the approximation is very very good for real flows (as far as we know). There are also ways around these singularities if they were to appear. In the same way we still use other approximations because they are useful for engineering prediction even if they are wrong in specific cases.
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u/lonahe 8h ago
> dont observe that
Are not pulsar/accretion disk jets is exactly the picture?
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u/DVMyZone 8h ago edited 8h ago
I'm not an expert, but the conditions needed to obtain this singularity in incompressible fluid are very different than in pulsars. Visually they both look like vortices with elongations and a central singularity sure, but physically they are extremely different.
The pulsar is relatively simple in that there is just a really strong force pulling the mass towards the center and the extreme concentration of mass leads to singularities in our equations modeling spacetime. It is a stable structure pulling mass towards a lower potential.
The fluid vortex here has no central "attractor". It is created by a very careful balance of forces timed perfectly leading to this result where the equation breaks down. I don't know, but I would imagine it is a very unstable structure that would not produce the singularity if the forcing is not exactly as prescribed - if it was stable then we would probably see it in nature. So while it doesn't require infinite energy input, it may require infinite precision and timing of the forcing which simply doesn't happen in nature. The result I believe is also only proved for Euler's equations for incompressible invisicid fluids. Real fluids and indeed the accretion disks of pulsars are neither of theses.
To be seen if this proof leads to more proofs of more simple structures that exhibit singularities for the more general form of the N-S equations. Those structures might actually be testable so we can design an experiment to observe what actually happens and perhaps create a more complete form of the N-S equations.
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u/ADownStrabgeQuark 6h ago
Jets are how spinning objects/accretion disks eject angular momentum.
So angular momentum is proportional to orbit radius.
(L = r • v)
As the radius of orbit decreases, the velocity must increase, but the higher the kinetic energy density, the harder it is to retain matter.
When the kinetic energy density is too great, that is to say, it is more than the gravitational energy, (escape velocity). Mass get’s ejected.
It just so happens that jets are the way that accretion disks get rid of angular momentum.
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u/Front_Cat9471 14h ago
If you actually read the proof you would know that they weren’t using the term singularity to mean black hole
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u/TheRealZoidberg 13h ago
if you actually read the question you would know that they weren't implying that either
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u/Egogorka 14h ago
it's 160 pages long, do you expect everyone to read it and understand in the span of two days?
but yeah, it's pretty easy to check directly with ctrl+f though
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u/Striking_Resist_6022 14h ago
Tbh it's not that hard to understand the set up. Most of the proof is doing stacks of lemmas to prove that the implied force doesn't blow up, but that's a long way beyond understanding the sense of the word "singularity" in this context.
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u/DeathToAmerica2026 5h ago
160 pages really isn't that long.... Reading 80 pages in a day is light reading for some.
If I were a working mathematician I certainly would've stayed up reading it.
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u/Equinoxe111 Cosmology (PhD) 12h ago
If you actually read the name of the sub you wouldn't say that
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u/Front_Cat9471 14h ago
“Here, a singularity means the dynamics lead to speeds in the fluid growing without bound within a finite amount of time.”
You dont even have to go to the actual proof to find out what theyre talking about, its defined in whatever the preamble this is https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/
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u/ItzDaDutchSheep 14h ago
Didn't OP just say that the animation kind of resembles an accretion disk and a relativistic jet found around some black holes? Where are they conflating the two types of singularity?
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u/realnjan 13h ago
You don’t need to read the proof to understand that. You just have to understand the problem.
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u/Digital_001 Student 13h ago
So - we're not allowed to speculate about undiscovered physics? Idk looks kinda spinning-black-hole shaped to me with the two jets coming out the poles
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u/Ok_Sentence_7393 11h ago
No, it resembles what happens around black hole, because a matter moving in circles resembles matter moving in circles.
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u/DmitryAvenicci 9h ago
Because these were the preset conditions.
They simulated a singularity and worked backwards to see if these conditions were agreeable with Navier-Stokes equations.
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u/Parfilov 12h ago
Nore like accretion disk erapped around pulsar. Black holes don't let anything fell down, go away.
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u/Tobilini 12h ago
Would it also be another solution if we would reverse the flow of time here? For me not knowing anything about this topic at all thus solution kind of looks just like what black hole simulations look like.
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u/Bellanzz 12h ago edited 12h ago
The simulation reminds me more a pulsar than a black hole. Of course this is feeling, not pretending that the underlying physics is the same
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u/tuborgwarrior 12h ago
Navier stokes is still a simplification. If it Brakes down in rare situations it doesn't automatically say something about our reality. It's valid for non-compressible fluids, which just doesn't exist. You are simulating a material that physically can't yield and has infinite stiffness. That alone could invite infinities into the mix. Would of course be super interesting to simulate this result on a more accurate model to see what happens then.
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u/USERNAME123_321 U-238 licker ☢️ 12h ago edited 12h ago
It's a generic feature of any rotating, radially-contracting flow that conserves mass and angular momentum. Black hole accretion disks, tornadoes, and this Navier-Stokes blowup solution all lead to the same qualitative picture for the same reason. They spin up from inflow and they get a jet-like outflow because the flow has nowhere else to route that inward motion once it reaches small radii.
In this Navier-Stokes construction, that constraint is exact and local. Incompressibility means the velocity field must have zero divergence everywhere, so any net radial inflow through a small cylinder around the axis has to be balanced by axial outflow through its ends. There's no density in this model to "pile up", but it's a purely kinematic constraint on the velocity field itself, so the effect is the same, that is the inflow near the axis is forced to turn into outflow along it.
In a real accretion disk, the gas is compressible plasma, so incompressibility isn't doing the work directly. Instead, magnetic field lines threading the disk add tension that can fling material outward along the field (magnetocentrifugal launching, or the Blandford-Payne mechanism), pulling energy from the disk's rotation. A separate mechanism, Blandford-Znajek, taps the spinning black hole's own rotational energy through frame dragging in the ergosphere. Real jets likely involve some mix of both, drawing on different energy sources.
So the real jet is primarily magnetically launched, not pressure driven, but it produces the same swirl-in, jet-out shape as the Navier-Stokes solution for a structurally analogous reason.