OpenAI Says Its AI Solved a Million-Dollar Math Problem in 88 Hours. The Mathematician It Raced Says OpenAI Learned the Route From Him and Asked Why He'd 'Ruin His Career'
About This Episode
On September 8 OpenAI published a proof, produced by an unreleased internal model coordinating about 10,000 agents over 88 hours, that the Navier-Stokes fluid equations can blow up in finite time, resolving the Clay Millennium Prize problem as officially written. Hours earlier NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic's Levent Alpöge posted their own AI-assisted blow-up results on the stepping-stone Euler equations, along with a statement alleging OpenAI began its effort only after hearing of their work, followed the same rarely-used 'forcing' route, could not say whether the model had been trained on the drafts they kept in Codex as paying customers, offered Buckmaster sole authorship if he dropped his Anthropic co-author, and when he refused, asked 'Why would you ruin your career?' OpenAI denies accessing their work; its own post says it 'cannot rule out' that de-identified usage data improved its models.
Our Take
OpenAI's machine may have solved a two-century-old equation, but the story is what happened to the man who was solving it inside OpenAI's own tool: his drafts sat in the company's product, the company raced down his route with fifteen million dollars of compute, and when he objected it asked why he would ruin his career, which turns the question every worker with an AI tool at work into a headline: does the company that owns the tool own what you do in it?
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The Tool That Trains Its Replacement
Buckmaster paid OpenAI to use Codex, kept a year of drafts inside it, and the company that owns the tool then raced him to the result while conceding it cannot rule out that his usage improved its model: everyday use of the tool as unpaid training for the thing that replaces you.
Gateway to Intelligence: Who Owns the AI On-Ramp
Frontier mathematics now runs through two or three doorways, and the doorkeeper sees the traffic, sets the terms of use, and can outspend any customer who walks through.