OpenAI said it had solved a mathematics problem involving the Navier–Stokes equations, which describe the movement of fluids and had remained unsolved for approximately 90 years. The company said it used a group of approximately 10,000 artificial intelligence agents that performed tasks partly autonomously, and that the work took 88 hours.
OpenAI described the solution it developed as a “milestone” demonstrating the rapid progress of artificial intelligence agents. The company said its mathematical model, whose development began at the end of August, drew on approximately 3 million messages and 130 billion data items.
The solution has not yet been independently verified
The solution announced by OpenAI has not yet been independently verified. The US-based Clay Mathematics Institute, which awards the Millennium Prizes in mathematics, has also not officially accepted the solution so far.
Two mathematicians claim to have worked on the problem
Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematics professor at New York University, argued that he and mathematician Levent Alpöge, who works at Anthropic, had also been working to solve the same problem and that OpenAI used their work.
Buckmaster claimed that OpenAI began working on a solution to the problem after he and Alpöge published their research. OpenAI congratulated the two mathematicians but argued that Buckmaster’s claim was not true.