Altman responds to Navier-Stokes proof race: offered to let rival team publish first and take prize
AccBalanced · x · 2026-09-09
Sam Altman posted a lengthy response to the Navier-Stokes proof priority dispute: the OpenAI team initially believed the other team had also solved the full problem and wanted a joint release. Upon learning they had Euler but not Navier-Stokes, OpenAI offered to let them go first and take the prize, even proposing Tristan as lead author on a rewrite of the OpenAI proof. Making the same offer to Levent (an Anthropic employee), who was unwilling to coordinate, felt harder.
The reposter offers a good-faith timeline: Tristan had the breakthrough, Andrew Curran tweeted the rumor, and Sebastian pushed the model to race to the answer. The unanswered question: whether the ten-thousand-agent swarm built on Tristan's work (de-identified or not) — trivially verifiable by opening up the traces.
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