OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said Tuesday it is sharing a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, a famously hard question about how fluids behave. The company credited an internal AI model working through a network of coordinated agents. These agents could read from a cached snapshot of the internet and execute code, and they were split into teams that could communicate within each group.
OpenAI said it organized agents into groups of varying sizes, and the group that ultimately produced the Navier-Stokes result ran with roughly 10,000 agents working at the same time. According to the company, the agents reached their conclusion on Saturday, September 5, approximately 88 hours after the first agents started running.
The push began on Sept. 1 after the company heard a rumor that someone had made headway on the problem, which it later learned referred to work by Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster. OpenAI said neither its researchers nor its agents saw any of that work before it was made public, and that no specific user data was accessed to solve the problem. It added that, while it considers it unlikely, de-identified data derived from their use of OpenAI products may have helped improve its models.
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Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematics professor at New York University, said he and Levent Alpöge of Anthropic have been collaborating personally on several math problems, including Navier-Stokes. Buckmaster wrote that Alpöge received tips suggesting information about their progress had been relayed to OpenAI, and he argued the path OpenAI described resembled their own, which he said is not a direction one reaches in just a few days by handing the problem statement to a model. He also raised the possibility that OpenAI's systems might have been trained using their Codex sessions or permitted to access them, noting they used several large language models during their work.
"I would like to be clear about what I am not claiming. I have not seen OpenAI's proof. I do not know what their model did, or how. I do not know whether our data was used," he added.
The Clay Mathematics Institute designated Navier-Stokes as one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems in 2000, with each offering a $1 million reward. The institute says the prizes were conceived "to elevate in the consciousness of the general public the fact that in mathematics, the frontier is still open and abounds in important unsolved problems; to emphasize the importance of working towards a solution of the deepest, most difficult problems; and to recognize achievement in mathematics of historical magnitude." Other headline problems on the list include the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture and the Riemann Hypothesis. The institute has not yet weighed in on OpenAI's claim.
For your wallet, here is the practical bit: frontier AI is moving fast, and breakthroughs can show up before the referees have blown the whistle. That mix often means sharp swings in sentiment and a lot of chatter before clarity arrives.
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