OpenAI nears second Millennium Prize with Hodge conjecture

OpenAI's reported push on the Hodge conjecture follows its still officially unconfirmed solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, one of math's seven famous Millennium Prize Problems. For that earlier effort, OpenAI used a variant of its next pretrained model, codenamed Doug, likely at a cost of millions of dollars. Chief researcher Jakub Pachocki had said at the Astra launch that OpenAI would focus on recursive self-improvement first, meaning AI that optimizes itself, rather than math.

What the company hopes to gain from solving these problems is unclear, though some inside OpenAI apparently believe it could feed into recursive self-improvement. The math community, meanwhile, is more angry than impressed, with some mathematicians seeing their entire field under threat. That reaction may explain why, after the PR crisis around Navier-Stokes, OpenAI wants to get the messaging right this time.

Whether a Hodge solution is announced soon hinges on OpenAI's messaging preparations, and the outcome matters most to mathematicians who see their field under threat and to OpenAI's own research teams exploring recursive self-improvement.