Rumor: OpenAI allegedly swooped in on leaked Navier-Stokes breakthrough, pressured mathematician over authorship
birchlse · x · 2026-09-08
A viral thread alleges that mathematician Levent and an NYU professor spent months vibing with frontier models (mostly Claude and Codex) toward a solution to Navier-Stokes, one of the Millennium Prize Problems. After word leaked, OpenAI reportedly threw a team and massive compute at the same direction and now claims its model finished the result.
Per the account, OpenAI offered either to post a day after the mathematician while publicly saying he "deserves the Clay Prize," or to let him write it up solo with Levent (who works at Ant Group, allegedly tied to IPO hype) dropped as an author. He refused, threatened to go public, and says an OpenAI C-suite figure then pressured him with lines like "Why would you ruin your career?" and "If you don't want me to be nice, then I don't have to be nice." He also asked whether OpenAI trained on his Codex sessions containing all his drafts — no answer. Follow-up posts suggest the earlier rumors "had substance." All claims are unverified.
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