What’s the point of MIT? OpenAI’s math proofs have thrown students and researchers into chaos.

Add Boston.com as your preferred source on Google to see more of our stories. Inside the math department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more than 100 students, professors, and postdocs solemnly shuffled into a lecture hall, as if they were going to group therapy. Two days before, on Sept. 8, OpenAI announced that its artificial intelligence agents solved one of the famed “Millennium Prize Problems,” involving the Navier-Stokes equations, which describe how fluids move. Solutions to each problem, posed in 2000, come with a $1 million prize and celebrity status in the field. For MIT’s mathematicians, especially doctoral students, the technological milestone marked the start of a full-fledged freak-out — and they needed a forum to discuss AI.