OpenAI's mystery model cracks key Navier-Stokes problem, math's 'AlphaGo moment'

新智元 · wechat · 2026-09-08

NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster says an internal OpenAI model, likely a next-gen 'Bel', has produced a 100-page proof for the force-driven blowup case of the Navier-Stokes equations — one of the Millennium Prize Problems.

The same day, Buckmaster and Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge released three results (porous medium, Boussinesq, 3D Euler equations) achieving finite-time blowup under smooth forcing with LLM assistance, with papers and Lean formalization code public. Terence Tao praised the work and explained the perturbation-based construction, while cautioning viscosity remains the key obstacle to reaching full Navier-Stokes.

A dispute is brewing: Buckmaster claims OpenAI twice asked him to remove Alpöge's authorship because he works at Anthropic, and left questions about whether user data trained the model unanswered. If the proof holds, this could be AI's 'AlphaGo moment' for mathematics.

Related event: Rumors Swirl That OpenAI Solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem Amid Priority Dispute(33 posts)→

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