BREAKING: OpenAI might have stolen another major proof.
In a detailed Mastodon post, which I report in full in the comments, Andreas Thom presents several pieces of evidence suggesting that OpenAI may have trained Astra on conversations in which he and Gábor Kun were working on Gromov’s soficity conjecture, one of the ten problems OpenAI later announced Astra had solved.
I know Andreas. We met several times early in our careers. He is an exceptional mathematician, a leading expert on sofic and hyperlinear groups, and one of the most respected scholars in the field. He has spent two decades working on this problem.
If his account is correct, this is not a minor dispute over attribution. It would mean that unpublished human work was absorbed into a model and then presented to the world as a breakthrough by the model itself.
And if the allegations raised by Levent Alpöge, Tristan Buckmaster, and now Andreas Thom are all substantiated, we are no longer looking at isolated incidents.
We may be looking at one of the greatest intellectual scandals in the history of science.
AI is not discovering new mathematics.
AI is stealing human discovery.
the whole timeline, from the equations to today:
1822: navier writes the equations down.
1845: stokes gets them right, and his name on them.
1934: leray shows weak solutions exist forever, and leaves smoothness open.
2000: clay puts $1m on that gap. fefferman writes the official statement, four options.
2014: luo and hou watch 3d euler blow up in numerics.
2016: tao proves blowup for an averaged navier-stokes.
2021: elgindi proves euler blowup for rough data.
2023 to 2026: córdoba and martínez-zoroa build forced blowups, with a rough force.
then this year:
aug 15: buckmaster and alpöge get smooth-forced blowup for boussinesq and euler, with claude and codex.
aug 22: lean checks it.
aug 28: per wired, openai starts training its math model.
sep 1: per axios, openai's run starts, after researchers hear rumors.
sep 3: buckmaster emails openai to say what they have.
sep 6, sunday: bubeck says openai had the final solution that morning. buckmaster says he was told on the afternoon call.
sep 8, 4am: buckmaster and alpöge post three papers and the lean repo. buckmaster posts his statement.
sep 8, 17:20 utc: openai posts "we're sharing a solution to the navier-stokes millennium prize problem."
https://t.co/MOmY67RLGM
Still more absolute 🔥 from Terence Tao:
“We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a massive amount of AI-powered effort to flatten it before the original research project has time to reach its full potential. The incentives may now be pointing in the direction of no longer sharing any promising research directions with the broader community, which would reverse centuries of traditions of open science and do serious long-term damage to the future of the field”
go fuck yourself @sama
claiming that you solved navier stokes because 10000 agents ran in circles for 88hours on a multimillion dollar gpu cluster to formalize in lean a blowup case under controlled external forcing is pure scientific vulgarity the clay mathematics institute millennium prize does not ask m whether you can artificially force a singularity in a fluid by injecting an ad hoc smooth external forcing term f(x,t) to twist the vortex until it breaks the real problem questions the fundamental stability and global smooth existence for 3dimensional incompressible euler & navier stokes equations under natural conservation laws and viscous dissipation alone using a mathematical loophole on forced equations to parade a century old victory is a major conceptual scam Altman
technically & epistemologically what you present as an agi breakthrough is nothing more than bruteforce combinatorial autoformalization the ai did not understand fluid mechanics it simply navigated a continuous search space previously mapped out and constrained by the monumental work of human mathematicians like tristan buckmaster/ levent alpöge / diego córdoba or tarek elgindi coordinating 10000 agents to check the logical consistency of a 100 page proof via lean is a software engineering feat and computational parallelization triumph not an intrinsic scientific discovery it is the victory of the compute bulldozer over abstract human intuition repackaged for the public as a higher mathematical consciousness
to this theoretical imposture you add a disgusting ethical and industrial cynicism taking advantage of private codex sessions and informal preprints from academic researchers to siphon their research leads and then trying to redact or erase the contribution of levent alpöge under the pretext that he works at rival anthropic is intellectual serfdom openai behaves like a feudal lord of silicon appropriating the cognitive subsistence of independent scholars threatening their careers behind closed doors if they protest and turning community academic labor into a privatized pressrelease
this entire staged event serves a desperate financial agenda in a pre ipo panic facing the slowdown of scaling laws and growing investor skepticism over the profitability of foundational models openai needs to manufacture an artificial sputnik moment claiming to solve a millennium prize without immediately submitting the proof to traditional peer review means using the prestige of fundamental mathematics as cheap marketing fuel to inflate a delusional valuation!!!
real science is not a clout chase on social media or a compute spike spent to rob the clay mathematics institute it is a quest for elegance physical truth and universal rigor to decode reality true artificial intelligence will not emerge from hostile corporate takeover of academic work hidden behind computational bruteforce but from architectures capable of generating new conceptual paradigms by masquerading constrained formalization as the collapse of physics greatest mysteries you did not solve navier stokes you only proved how far silicon valley will go to prostitute scientific integrity for capitalist spectacle
This is the visualization we've all been waiting to see. Read the questions and insightful replies by @joonas_nattila in the thread below. I learned a lot from reading his answers. And his supercomputer visualization is really instructive!
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
This morning, mathematicians at OpenAI announced that a group of 10,000 autonomous AI agents under their direction proved that the Navier-Stokes equations can “blow up,” thus solving one of the six remaining Millennium Prize Problems. But this massive result is not without controversy. https://t.co/I0f1hwvETo
Visualization of the Navier-Stokes blowup solution: left- and right-handed swirls (blue and purple) wind up while the axial flow (brown) shrinks, but slower. As a result, the vortex core develops a singularity.
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