OpenAI says 10,000 concurrent agents tackled Navier–Stokes, result in 88 hours

HotFlamingo9653 · reddit · 2026-09-20

Per OpenAI, roughly 10,000 concurrent agents worked on the Navier–Stokes problem, exploring different approaches and exchanging millions of messages. The result reportedly came 88 hours after launch, with Lean formalization and verification taking another 17 hours.

The author digs into the hard part of multi-agent systems at scale: deduplicating work, tracking contradictory assumptions and dead ends, maintaining a shared record of what's proven vs. plausible, and deciding when to merge branches. They describe their smaller-scale experiment apodex, which kept separate branches (math history, formal verification, competing interpretations, Clay requirements) and tried to consolidate findings into one coherent analysis.

They ask builders: is the biggest bottleneck delegation, shared memory, evaluating intermediate work, or merging conflicting branches?

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