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.
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