OpenAI's 88-hour Navier–Stokes run could have funded 600 postdocs for a year
giffmana · x · 2026-09-12
Lucien Heurtier argued that the compute cost of OpenAI's 88-hour Navier–Stokes effort could instead have hired 600 postdocs for a year — hundreds of scientists working on hundreds of problems, likely yielding far more discoveries and innovation. AI development is fine, he wrote, but not at the cost of defunding science. Retweeters giffmana and SamPassey3 countered by invoking Milton Friedman's spoons anecdote: digging a canal with spoons 'creates more jobs' than machines, a jab at the compute-versus-labor framing.
Related event: OpenAI's 88-hour supercomputing run could fund 600 postdocs for a year(3 posts)→
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