OpenAI Claims It Solved the Navier-Stokes Problem. We Asked Cornell Professors What This Means for the Future of Research.

OpenAI claimed in September that one of its models had solved a mathematical problem worth one million dollars: the Navier-Stokes Problem. The Navier-Stokes Problem is one of seven “Millennium Prize Problems” proposed by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000, each a famously unsolved mathematical problem with a million-dollar prize attached to finding a solution. On Sept. 8, OpenAI announced that an “internal OpenAI system” had solved the Navier-Stokes Problem — news that was followed by shock and uncertainty from mathematicians about how this solution was determined and who should get credit. Given that artificial intelligence seems to have solved a problem that challenged human mathematicians for decades, the announcement from OpenAI raised broader questions about the role of human researchers and the future of mathematics as AI capabilities grow.