OpenAI's Millennium Prize proof sparks credit feud as 25 Fields Medalists push back
CiccioPixel · reddit · 2026-09-13
A dispute erupted over the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem: NYU's Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic's Levent Alpöge announced progress, then OpenAI released its own full proof — reportedly from an unreleased model that burned 300B output tokens, roughly $22.5M in compute, in about a week. Buckmaster alleges his progress leaked to OpenAI beforehand and that OpenAI's Sébastien Bubeck pressured him to drop his collaborator's credit, allegedly saying "why would you ruin your career." OpenAI denies seeing their work but can't fully rule out anonymized product data playing a role. 25 Fields Medalists signed an open letter against racing proofs without proper writeup and attribution, and OpenAI pulled sponsorship of a Caltech math event after researcher backlash. The story is less about whether AI can do math than what happens to scientific credit once compute-rich labs race individual academics.
Related event: OpenAI's 10,000-Agent Navier-Stokes Claim Sparks Math Community Credit War(18 posts)→
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