$1M sounds like a lot — it's just 10.5 minutes of OpenAI's compute spend
wordgrammer · x · 2026-09-09
A quick back-of-envelope post points out that $1,000,000, while sounding like a fortune, covers only 10.5 minutes of OpenAI's compute spending. The number puts into perspective just how enormous frontier AI companies' infrastructure burn rate has become — and echoes the observation that the compute used to solve the Navier-Stokes problem likely far exceeded the prize money.
Related event: OpenAI's Costly Navier-Stokes Run Sparks Scooping and Brute-Force Debate(26 posts)→
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