OpenAI Claims Major Progress on a Second Millennium Prize Problem, Sparking Academia Backlash
新智元 · wechat · 2026-09-17
OpenAI president Greg Brockman says the company has made "significant progress on another" Millennium Prize Problem, following its Navier–Stokes breakthrough, fueling speculation of a DevDay reveal — with rumors pointing to two of the six remaining problems, possibly including P vs NP.
The earlier breakthrough used 10,000 reasoning agents over 88 hours, 2.7M messages, and 130B output tokens to prove smooth fluids develop finite-time singularities, fully formalized in Lean.
Controversy: After hundreds of mathematicians protested, OpenAI withdrew sponsorship of Caltech's first Mathathon. NYU's Tristan Buckmaster alleged his pre-publication progress leaked to OpenAI, which then burned 300B tokens in about a week to produce a complete proof with an unreleased model — and claims mathematician Sébastien Bubeck pressured him to drop a co-author's name. Brockman says the solving model's training cutoff predates the scholars' publication.
The core anxiety: when a scholar's public AI opens a crack in a century-old problem, a giant with 1000× compute can flatten the rest in days. Brockman argues these problems are the ultimate testbed for long-chain rigorous reasoning that will transfer to drug discovery and molecular dynamics.
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