OpenAI announced a solution to a 90-year-old mathematical puzzle, but the breakthrough is clouded by immediate controversy. On Tuesday, the company revealed it solved the Navier-Stokes problem—one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems offering a $1 million reward—using an internal AI model that outperforms the newly released GPT-6 Astra, supported by 10,000 concurrent agents.
The solution marks a historic achievement for the mathematics community, but it quickly faced scrutiny. Just one day prior, New York University mathematics professor Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge from Anthropic published findings on a related problem.
Buckmaster alleges that OpenAI utilized their research route, raising concerns about data privacy. He questioned the model's access to their sessions on Codex, stating, “I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project.” He added that when pressed on training data, he did not receive a direct answer.
OpenAI has pushed back against these accusations, asserting that “no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem.” The company acknowledges that while unlikely, de-identified data derived from user product usage might have indirectly improved their models. OpenAI technical staff member Sebastien Bubeck added, “We did not see any of their [Buckmaster and Alpöge’s] work until they released it publicly last night.”
Buckmaster countered these claims, stating that OpenAI is “openly admitting they used training data from a period after we found our result.” Despite the drama, OpenAI has stated it does not plan to claim the $1 million prize.
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