OpenAI beats rivals to Navier-Stokes, chilling academia

The controversy stems from how OpenAI arrived at its result. According to the company, it began working on the problem after hearing rumors on Twitter that other researchers were making progress on Millennium Prize problems, and it later realized those rumors concerned Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge, a researcher at Anthropic. Buckmaster said he contacted OpenAI after learning the company was aware of his progress, to ask when it began working on the problem and what data its model had been trained on, and that the conversation quickly turned sour.

OpenAI has denied using any specific user data, but it could not conclusively rule out an indirect influence, saying that while unlikely, it cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of its products helped improve its models. That ambiguity compounds the unease. Several mathematicians said the mere thought that AI systems might steal ideas from their queries is chilling, and that they may become more cautious about sharing work in progress.

What happens next hinges on whether OpenAI or other AI companies can convincingly assure researchers that their chat logs are not used to improve models. The Clay Mathematics Institute has yet to award the $1 million bounty, and OpenAI says it does not intend to claim it. Still, some professors wonder whether this marks the beginning of the end for AI companies' involvement in research mathematics, or whether such races will remain rare because only a few problems are worth the vast sums involved.