OpenAI says a new artificial intelligence model, supported by around 10,000 AI agents, has produced a solution to important parts of the long-standing Navier-Stokes problem in just 88 hours. The mathematical challenge concerns the movement of fluids and has remained unresolved in significant areas for about 90 years. The company said its AI agents exchanged nearly 3 million messages and generated about 130 billion output tokens while working on the problem. OpenAI estimated that reproducing the effort using its most advanced models could cost around $10 million based on its published pricing. The reported work addresses two of the four statements required for the Millennium Prize problem, which carries a $1 million award. However, the solution has not yet been independently verified or formally accepted by the Clay Mathematics Institute. The announcement has also triggered concerns from mathematician Tristan Buckmaster of New York University. He said he and Levent Alpöge of Anthropic had been working on related problems and claimed information about their progress had reached OpenAI before its announcement. OpenAI denied accessing their work and said its proof differs significantly from the researchers’ results. The company also said it cannot completely rule out whether de-identified information from product use may have indirectly contributed to model improvement. OpenAI described the result as evidence of rapid progress in AI-assisted mathematics but said it was not claiming the Millennium Prize. The development highlights both the growing mathematical capabilities of AI systems and questions about how independently produced research should be handled when advanced AI tools are involved.
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