OpenAI Says Its AI Solved a Million-Dollar Math Problem in 88 Hours. The Mathematician It Raced Says OpenAI Learned the Route From Him and Asked Why He'd 'Ruin His Career'

Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts · Sep 9, 2026 · 5m · transcript

On September 8 OpenAI published a proof, produced by an unreleased internal model coordinating about 10,000 agents over 88 hours, that the Navier-Stokes fluid equations can blow up in finite time, resolving the Clay Millennium Prize problem as officially written. Hours earlier NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic's Levent Alpöge posted their own AI-assisted blow-up results on the stepping-stone Euler equations, along with a statement alleging OpenAI began its effort only after hearing of their work, followed the same rarely-used 'forcing' route, could not say whether the model…