Aerospace professor pours cold water on 'AI solved Navier-Stokes' claims
Mindrust · reddit · 2026-09-09
Professor Chris Combs offers seven pointed caveats on the OpenAI Navier-Stokes news:
- Claims that N-S was 'solved' are incorrect and overblown; at most, a proof for a very niche scenario (a perfectly smooth, incompressible, finite-energy initial condition potentially producing a singularity).
- There is no general closed-form solution involved, and this changes essentially nothing about how N-S is used in practice.
- Aerospace already treats N-S as an approximation, routinely dropping terms; exact solutions like laminar pipe flow and the 2D Taylor-Green vortex already exist.
- N-S assumes a continuum fluid, and real fluids can't have infinite velocity or energy—pushing equations past their validity naturally yields funky singularities.
His bottom line: 'take a deep breath'—this is more a mathematical curiosity than a practical breakthrough.
Related event: Experts Push Back on OpenAI's Navier-Stokes Claim as Engineering Hype(2 posts)→
More from Models
- OpenAI's 11-day-trained model and ~10,000 coordinating agents cracked Navier–Stokes — peterwildeford · 2026-09-09
- Grok on AI cracking Navier-Stokes: not surprising, AI stood on giants' shoulders — robleclerc · 2026-09-09
- GPT-6 Astra tops Andon Labs' Vending-Bench, unseating Fable — Outside-Iron-8242 · 2026-09-09
- OpenAI: training new internal model with 'unprecedented' math benchmark performance — TheZvi · 2026-09-09
- DeepSeek v4.1 Flash flash sale: 58M tokens for $1, available for 2 days only — MicahBerkley · 2026-09-09
- OpenAI's Noam Brown: in a year, everyone will have AI that can tackle Millennium Prize Problems — Neurogence · 2026-09-09