The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

Because it's cheap and easy. Hold for many such questions...

Why is all of the world dependent on tech an ever more hostile US? Same answer.

I mean this is just the logical end game. The company/ies that control the uber mind will devour ALL useful or valuable work. Unlimited intelligence at unlimited scale means the value of humans for knowledge work goes to zero. We will eventually not have meaningful access to the uberminds because we will be pointless. At which point our Silicon Valley luminaries will really have no choice but to extinguish as many of us as possible for the greater good. After all if we are all pointless then that has to be weighed against are cost to Mother Earth. Clearly the only moral solution is to cull or allow to be culled some 98% or so down to a more sustainable, manageable population of curiosities. The end game of ai is the remnants of humanity in a zoo, and that’s if humans control the outcome… the machine minds might be more charitable as they would be less afraid…

You don't need a GOOD proof, just A proof.

I don't get the sales pitch, spend 15 million dollars to win a 1 million dollar price?

Showing of the model's capabilities - okay, but it's not like it solved the problem on its own, and apparently not particularly efficient. Are there practical applications that justify the investment?

Occam's Razor says: "They heard this problem is solved or about to be solved amongst the rest of the other problems. They prioritized this and put substantial compute with their newest model and solved it." I know everyone loves juicy rumors, theories etc. but honestly that is the simplest and most plausible explanation given the state of AI improvement now. Obviously spending 15 million on a problem is not a slam dunk decision even for a company like OpenAI but if it has a significantly high chance of solving it and their competitor will be claiming they solved it, then it raises the stakes and they go after it. In fact this is the most rational and also curiosity-driven thing to do and totally what I would have expected from any frontier lab. Of course if one wants to prove their confirmation biases that they train on sessions or be able to identify individual users, the non-zero chance of that being also another explanation is attractive enough to wet their appetites.