OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

#61

Post by pinkmuffinere » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 12:13 AM UTC

timschmidt wrote: post #48

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #33

Setting aside the disagreement, I was very interested to see the net pricing of the discovery: > All told, the week-long effort consumed 300 billion output tokens — $22.5 million worth of compute, if charged at current Astra rates. > The Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem is one of the seven Millennium Prize problems — a set of major unsolved math problems, each carrying a $1 million bounty I know openAI…

> 300 billion output tokens — $22.5 million worth of compute, if charged at current Astra rates. This makes the 100 billion tokens (total in/out) I've spent on my project on the $200/mo plan seem like a deal. Wow.

Wow I wonder how much of that differential is them operating at an extreme loss, and how much is the relative cost of their new models vs old. If a significant portion of that is net losses, I'm very concerned for their business model :|

Re: OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

#62

Post by DrewADesign » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:15 AM UTC

jdm2212 wrote: post #57

DrewADesign wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it sounds like a retroactively contrived explanation of events. If they released a statement on it, they clearly feel the need to give an explanation of their behavior. People criticize OpenAI every day and they rarely address it. They addressed this. That right there says that, at the very least, they’re concerned about the optics.

They released a statement on how they solved one of the biggest open problems in math. That statement includes a narrative of how they decided to tackle the problem. Idk what seems retroactive and contrived about, like, "we thought our archrival had made a huge breakthrough and wanted to make sure we're not falling behind".

Ok

Re: OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

#63

Post by tmsh » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 5:01 AM UTC

tmsh wrote: post #54

dist-epoch wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI says they just pointed the AI at the problem: > Regarding the level of human involvement on our end: although a group of people was involved in our efforts, we collectively had no research-level expertise in fluid dynamics and the Navier-Stokes problem, and therefore were unable to meaningfully contribute to the mathematical content. https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379415747342689

They needed the general direction and idea it might work from a few folks tinkering for a year with the same models that we all have access to. The majority of credit goes to them. The idea of where to look with AI is key. Models didn't do that by themselves. Trust: https://x.com/__alpoge__ "since on my side things were mostly me and claude having a good time yoloing random stuff in the corner rather than anything in…

Also: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf

I had planned to say on announcing our work that the results are not the important thing. Rather the important thing is instead the significance that a mathematician and an LLM model can now do all this work in a month

Re: OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

#64

Post by johnnyApplePRNG » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 7:06 AM UTC

babelfish wrote: post #34

johnnyApplePRNG wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They brute forced it, that proves they had no business solving it. They didn't know what they were doing and they pumped a bunch more carbon into our atmosphere because hubris basically. Shame on them.

Every sentence in this comment is incorrect

This article proves otherwise https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/8/on-navier-stokes/