OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem, says NYU mathematician
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NYU mathematics professor Tristan Buckmaster announced significant progress on the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize problems, in collaboration with Anthropic mathematician Levent Alpöge. This announcement was accompanied by a controversy regarding OpenAI’s parallel efforts to solve the same issue using its Codex and Claude models. Buckmaster alleges that OpenAI received information about his team's specific approach before it became public, leading to a race where OpenAI utilized massive computational resources to publish a full proof shortly after. The dispute intensified when OpenAI reportedly pressured Buckmaster to remove Alpöge’s credit from the work, threatening his career if he refused. While OpenAI denies accessing any specific user data or seeing the unpublished work, they acknowledge that de-identified data might have improved their underlying models. Buckmaster finds it suspicious that OpenAI adopted the exact same rare mathematical tactic within days, suggesting they leveraged their material advantage in compute power. The incident highlights growing tensions over academic attribution and the ethical implications of AI training on user-generated research content. Ultimately, the conflict reignites broader debates about transparency and fairness in the intersection of artificial intelligence and theoretical mathematics.
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