doomslide.substack.com/p/mathematics-is-effectively-dead?r=4d02jh&utm_campaign=p...
1 correction found
According to OAI, they began working on the Navier--Stokes millennium problem after hearing a rumor that Alpöge and Buckmaster were cracking forced Euler using an internal Anthropic model.
OpenAI’s own account says something different: it launched work on all open Millennium Prize problems after vague rumors on September 1, and only later learned the rumor concerned Alpöge and Buckmaster’s forced-Euler result.
Full reasoning
OpenAI’s published timeline does not say it started on Navier–Stokes after hearing a rumor that Alpöge and Buckmaster were solving forced Euler with an internal Anthropic model.
What OpenAI says instead is:
- On September 1, 2026 it heard only vague rumors that “two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved,” and that this prompted an effort on all open Millennium Prize problems, not Navier–Stokes alone.
- OpenAI then says it first got an unforced Euler result from its own system, and after that decided Navier–Stokes was the most promising target.
- Only after completing its project and Lean verification did it say it found out that Alpöge and Buckmaster had, using an internal Anthropic model, produced a forced Euler result.
So the article compresses the sequence in a way that changes the meaning: it moves the “forced Euler/internal Anthropic model” information to the beginning of the story, even though OpenAI says it learned that detail only later.
3 sources
- On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem | OpenAI
On Tuesday, September 1, we heard rumors that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved... we launched an effort to evaluate it on all open Millennium Prize problems... Once we saw the Euler solution, we thought that Navier–Stokes was the most promising problem to work on... After the completion of our full project and Lean verification ... we found out that, using an internal Anthropic model, they had produced a resolution of the forced Euler problem.
- Math Can't Go On Like This | The Atlantic
OpenAI said that it had tasked its AI systems to work on all of the Millennium Problems after hearing rumors that Anthropic had solved two of them.
- He was close to a huge math breakthrough. Then he got scooped by AI. | The Washington Post
OpenAI’s push to solve the Millennium Prize problems was spurred by a rumor online that Anthropic had solved at least one of them... OpenAI researchers launched a swarm of 'agents' to attack all six of the open Millennium Prize questions.