NYU mathematician accuses OpenAI of racing to beat him on $1M math proof

NYU mathematics professor Tristan Buckmaster accused OpenAI of using leaked information about his work to race ahead on the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize problems carrying a $1 million bounty from the Clay Mathematics Institute.

Buckmaster announced three proofs on Tuesday with a preliminary finding on the problem, made with Anthropic mathematician Levent Alpöge using both Codex and Claude AI models. In his statement, he wrote that while finalizing their results, the pair learned that "information about our progress had been passed to OpenAI." When they contacted OpenAI, they were told the company had already achieved a full proof. But followup questions about when OpenAI began its research and how much human input was involved drew evasive answers, Buckmaster said. He said it eventually emerged that an entire team had worked on the problem with "an insane amount of compute," and that the first prompt had been sent only in the past few days, after information about their work reached OpenAI.

Sebastian Bubeck, who leads OpenAI's mathematical research, called the claims "false and inflammatory," saying he came into the discussion following academic norms and would make a fuller statement soon. Ethan Mollick called the development "a VERY big one" if true, while noting the credit dispute needs resolution.