Thom Wolf: OpenAI's Navier-Stokes Result Is a Counterexample, Not a Full Proof — Math Isn't 'Solved'
burny_tech · x · 2026-09-09
OpenAI announced that a group of agents, using a next-gen model significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra, produced a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, unresolved for 90 years. Thom Wolf, co-author of the Transformer paper, pushes back: the winning option C solved the problem by proving the conjecture false — a counterexample, not a full proof. He notes a pattern in recent frontier AI math results: a striking number involve counterexamples or needle-in-a-haystack finds. While extraordinarily impressive and far beyond the human mind in some respects, this is only one aspect of what mathematicians do — math is not (yet) 'solved.'
Related event: OpenAI claims 10,000 agents solved Navier-Stokes, sparking authorship row(421 posts)→
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