OpenAI spent millions to solve this famous math problem — mathematicians are furious
Tuesday, September 8 will go down as a milestone in artificial intelligence alongside IBM’s Deep Blue defeating world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997 and AlexNet winning the 2012 ImageNet competition . For the first time, an AI model was used to solve one of math’s most famous problems — a Millennium Problem . OpenAI announced that a swarm of 10,000 agents had produced a solution to a problem known as Navier-Stokes. Unlike those earlier AI milestones, however, no one was happy on Tuesday. Not even OpenAI. The night before OpenAI’s announcement, the NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster announced that he and collaborator Levent Alpöge had solved three problems closely related to Navier-Stokes. Alongside rough drafts of three papers — some 245 pages in total — Buckmaster released a statement excoriating OpenAI. “I had planned to say on announcing our work that the results are not the important thing. Rather the important thing is instead the significance that a mathematician and a
