On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem • Hacker News Board

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#641

Post by fc417fc802 » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 9:04 PM UTC

peri-cl wrote: post #285

Maxious wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI version of events conceed some of the words alleged to have been used may have been used https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310

> "When we learned that they had Euler but not Navier-Stokes, we offered to let them go first, to suggest that they should be the ones to get the prize, and optionally for Tristan to be the lead author on a rewrite of the OpenAI proof. We felt it was challenging to offer the same to Levent (an Anthropic employee), who was not willing to talk or coordinate with us anyway. We were open to other solutions." What an admi…

That isn't what the quoted passage says though? The claim by openai (no idea if true) is that they offered to wait for the other two to claim the prize before publishing their own work. Separately, they also offered to let one of the pair (but not the other) become an author on their own separate work.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#642

Post by ImPostingOnHN » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 9:05 PM UTC

fph wrote: post #415

amluto wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models . That’s a bizarre statement. Their website says: > Services for individuals, such as ChatGPT and Codex > When you use our services for individuals such as ChatGPT and Codex, we may use your content to train our models. > You can opt out of training through our privacy portal by clicking on…

Do we have a first-hand confirmation that Buckmaster and/or Alpoge opted out? At this point it seems important information.

Whether they opted out would help assess the degree of wrongdoing, but regardless, using their own data to try to scoop them is unethical.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#643

Post by TZubiri » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 9:05 PM UTC

20k wrote: post #234

ameliaquining wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what anyone's been saying on Twitter and I don't care. If it's really true that there's a model out there that's that capable two weeks after the start of training, then that's objectively a much bigger deal than a priority dispute, even if the latter involves juicy allegations of espionage and skulduggery.

It isn't a priority dispute, the more concerning allegation is that OpenAI may be training their models on prompts that mathematicians were using to solve this problem, and then surprise surprise OpenAI were able to replicate that work in their latest model What we're really looking at is seemingly a massive plagiarism scandal, which especially brings a lot of the past results into question If OpenAI is training mode…

>It isn't a priority dispute, the more concerning allegation is that OpenAI may be training their models on prompts that mathematicians were using to solve this problem,

I don't want to get epistemiological, but these aren't allegations, and your use of "may be" is more of lack of knowledge on how OpenAI and ChatGPT work. Read the Terms of Service, this is not a secret, OAI doesn't deny it, usage of ChatGPT through the web interface or through its App, including Codex, are shared with OAI and used to train future models. This is one of the ways in which ChatGPT works and improves, welcome to the subject.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#644

Post by Chance-Device » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 9:05 PM UTC

tedsanders wrote: post #181

lambda wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't they rule it out? Is even OpenAI unable to track the provenance of all of their training data? This is one of the major problems with these enormous closed models, and even most open-weights models, which don't disclose their training process or training data. You can never be sure what went into its training. Did it come up with an idea originally, or is it just plagiarising its training data? Are there ma…

To truly prove some incidental usage data made no difference we'd have to (a) identify any of their de-identified data that came from their usage of ChatGPT, (b) train a bunch of expensive giant models, and (c) ask them all to solve the Navier-Stokes Millenium problem until hitting some level of statistical significance. It's just not feasible to run experiments like this to prove whether a piece of data has an effec…

Please answer this question: do you or do you not train your models on anonymized user data, where those users have opted out of such training?

The blog post appears to imply the answer to this is yes, as otherwise I assume it would be impossible for this contamination to have happened.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#645

Post by tene80i » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 9:05 PM UTC

Chinjut wrote: post #606

What is going to become of life for those of us who do not work at AI labs and are unlikely to be hired by AI labs, despite all the years we put into learning math, coding, etc? Those of us who made the mistake of studying anything other than machine learning. How will we make a living? (We don't live in a world that seems likely to distribute gains widely instead of largely to the handful of already mega-rich.)

Most jobs don't involve formally verifiable outputs. Lots of things involve judgment, nuance, parsing ambiguity and indeed just being a human who can be in a meeting and explain themselves. Maybe those jobs will go too, eventually, but it's not purely a function of applying 10,000 agents to the problem.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#646

Post by TZubiri » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 9:05 PM UTC

20k wrote: post #234

ameliaquining wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what anyone's been saying on Twitter and I don't care. If it's really true that there's a model out there that's that capable two weeks after the start of training, then that's objectively a much bigger deal than a priority dispute, even if the latter involves juicy allegations of espionage and skulduggery.

It isn't a priority dispute, the more concerning allegation is that OpenAI may be training their models on prompts that mathematicians were using to solve this problem, and then surprise surprise OpenAI were able to replicate that work in their latest model What we're really looking at is seemingly a massive plagiarism scandal, which especially brings a lot of the past results into question If OpenAI is training mode…

>It isn't a priority dispute, the more concerning allegation is that OpenAI may be training their models on prompts that mathematicians were using to solve this problem,

I don't want to get epistemiological, but these aren't allegations, and your use of "may be" is more of lack of knowledge on how OpenAI and ChatGPT work. Read the Terms of Service, this is not a secret, OAI doesn't deny it, usage of ChatGPT through the web interface or through its App, including Codex, are shared with OAI and used to train future models. This is one of the ways in which ChatGPT works and improves, it's not something we are learning now, it's something that was always known, welcome to the subject.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#647

Post by HDThoreaun » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 9:06 PM UTC

Kotlopou wrote: post #368

demirbey05 wrote: post #278

From Levent Alpöge : https://x.com/__alpoge__/status/2097383870773748190?s=20 >so far the proof looks more along the lines of another euler blowup proof we had, off of whose ansatz naming we were making really stupid puns like “smooth criminale”, unlike the much better “ideal fluids explode”, Tristan There are too many ambiguities around OpenAI. Unanswered questions making this ambiguity more. Why they didn't properl…

Why do so many people involved here have to communicate in this childish way? You have people on the OpenAI side doing playground taunts ( https://xcancel.com/polynoamial/status/2097215233119211902 ) and Levent Alpöge on the Anthropic side (the one who announced "hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx to my close friend akhil for asking about it and my other close friend fable for working during the world…

The honest answer is that a lot of these academic mathematician types who get hired at ai labs are autist adjacent. Levent is basically the chief example

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#648

Post by cyclopeanutopia » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 9:06 PM UTC

siva7 wrote: post #596

WarmWash wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will history look back at comments like these as people being dumb, or people trying to cope?

It's denial and coping. Most people i see show this tendency around AI which is also why it 's easy to be far ahead of most population nowadays

I'd say that believing to be "far ahead" is much deeper kind of coping.

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#649

Post by fc417fc802 » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 9:07 PM UTC

dakolli wrote: post #431

dboreham wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That said, perhaps it will take over the world government and decree that all corrupt officials shall be imprisoned and all weapons of mass destruction shall be destroyed.

You think a model with an effective memory of 200-500k words, that can be unplugged, is going to "run the world" You people gotta put down the sci-fi

Many present day politicians appear to have effective memories much smaller than that coupled with equally questionable world models so ... what is your point, exactly?

Re: On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

#650

Post by Chinjut » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 9:07 PM UTC

tene80i wrote: post #645

Chinjut wrote: post #606

What is going to become of life for those of us who do not work at AI labs and are unlikely to be hired by AI labs, despite all the years we put into learning math, coding, etc? Those of us who made the mistake of studying anything other than machine learning. How will we make a living? (We don't live in a world that seems likely to distribute gains widely instead of largely to the handful of already mega-rich.)

Most jobs don't involve formally verifiable outputs. Lots of things involve judgment, nuance, parsing ambiguity and indeed just being a human who can be in a meeting and explain themselves. Maybe those jobs will go too, eventually, but it's not purely a function of applying 10,000 agents to the problem.

Much though jobs may involve those things, it has been rare for me to be in a position where management has valued those things to an extent where they would discern between me and a frontier reasoning LLM's capabilities on those same decisions.