OpenAI’s blockbuster math proof isn’t what you think it is

Rumors that OpenAI’s “Navier-Stokes” solution stole the work of two mathematicians may have been overblown Mathematicians are finally making sense of the biggest event in decades for their field—and it’s stranger than anyone thought. In early September, OpenAI posted an inscrutable 166-page solution of the Navier-Stokes problem, one math’s famed “ million-dollar problems .” Initial accounts—including from the company itself—suggested that the proof, produced by an internal large language model, followed an approach devised by two Spanish mathematicians, Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa. The model’s purported reliance on this “Spanish program” sparked a very public conflict between the company and Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematician at New York University.