OpenAI announced this week that its artificial intelligence model has solved a Millennium Prize Problem, a complex mathematical challenge that has remained unsolved for nearly a century. The company stated its AI, named Astra, proved that the dynamics of Navier-Stokes equations for fluid motion can develop a singularity in finite time.
However, Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematics professor at New York University, has come forward with allegations that OpenAI may have used his research and attempted to strong-arm him into a joint announcement. Buckmaster, who was working with Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge on a related problem, claims that OpenAI scientists approached him after becoming aware of his work.
According to Buckmaster, OpenAI scientists asked him to jointly announce the solution, asserting they had independently solved the Navier-Stokes problem. He questioned the timing of their discovery, noting it occurred only days after OpenAI became aware of his research. Buckmaster stated he asked OpenAI experts if their AI systems had accessed his research, but they declined to answer, leading him to question their rapid progress.
In a blog post, Buckmaster expressed disbelief at the speed of OpenAI's purported solution, writing, "The puzzle is not the direction one arrives at in a few days." He also raised ethical concerns, asking, "Is it ethical to use customer’s data to try to scoop their customer?"
Buckmaster also alleged that Sébastien Bubeck, an OpenAI scientist, issued a veiled threat, asking, "Why would you want to ruin your career?" and adding, "If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice."
Bubeck later addressed the accusation on X, formerly Twitter, stating he intended to warn Buckmaster about the potential damage to his career from making "unfounded claims." He acknowledged that his wording was a "poor choice of words."
OpenAI's announcement stated that no user data was incorporated into its model to solve the problem, but the company noted it "cannot rule out" that anonymized data was used to "improve our models."
Only one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, the Poincaré conjecture, has been solved and verified in the 26 years since the Clay Mathematics Institute designated them in 2000. Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman solved it between 2002 and 2003 but famously declined the $1 million prize. In 2018, mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah claimed to have solved another problem, the Riemann hypothesis, but his proof was ultimately rejected by the mathematical community due to fatal logical flaws.