OpenAI says it cracked 90-year-old maths problem in 88 hours

JUST IN: OpenAI says it cracked a 90-year-old maths problem in 88 hours, claiming a solution to parts of the Navier-Stokes equations. The claim has quickly stirred controversy.

OpenAI says it solved a 90-year-old maths problem in 88 hours.

Sam Altman's company set roughly ten thousand AI agents loose on the Navier-Stokes equations, the maths behind how fluids move and why turbulence still baffles physicists. The bots swapped nearly three million messages and burned 130 billion tokens, which at OpenAI's own prices would run about ten million dollars of compute. You can see the announcement they put out here.

Now, the caveats, and they're big ones. This is a Millennium Prize problem, a million dollars to whoever cracks it, and the Clay Mathematics Institute has verified nothing. OpenAI says it resolved two of the four required statements, not the whole thing, and it isn't claiming the prize. The model itself stays locked inside the company.

So mathematicians are already pushing back, and until independent reviewers sign off, this is a claim, not a proof. Ten million dollars of compute bought a very loud maybe.

This is Sara White, reporting for HIT.