Mark Chen

Chief Research Officer at @OpenAI. Coach for the USA IOI Team.

[Mark Chen @markchen90]

We solved Navier-Stokes!

Many of my colleagues left their fields because they believed that working on AI would be the fastest way to solve their fields' grand challenges.

It's surreal to see the first of those challenges fall and to watch a future we believed in become real.

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

We’re sharing a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, one of the deepest problems at the frontier of mathematics.

The proof was produced by a group of agents, using an OpenAI next-generation model significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra.

The problem concerns whether the description of smooth three-dimensional fluid motion modeled by the Navier-Stokes equations can break down. It has remained unresolved for roughly 90 years.

[Mark Chen @markchen90]

Ok cool but can he make 24 from 3, 3, 8, 8?

[swyx @swyx]

this is my quant

[Greg Brockman @gdb]

Over the past two months, we have been leading a coalition to mitigate one of the most severe bugs in open source software found in recent memory, php2shell, found as part of our Patch the Planet initiative. https://t.co/rBsz7lrlwo

[Mark Chen @markchen90]

Excited to welcome Orchestra Bio and @ashokaraj_ to OpenAI as we broaden our work in AI-assisted drug discovery!

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

We’ve acquired Orchestra Bio, a platform that helps biopharma teams coordinate the complex process of drug development.

Together, we’ll build on Rosalind, our AI models and tools for life sciences research, to streamline those operations and help new treatments reach patients sooner.

Welcome @ashokaraj_ and team!

https://t.co/vi51OhznQn

[Aleksander Madry @aleks_madry]

Personal update: Turns out that what I thought was leaving OpenAI became more of a sabbatical.

When I left a few months ago, I felt that the most important thing to focus on was making AI more useful to people. But we’ve since entered a different regime of AI progress. One in which getting the safety and security challenges of increasingly capable AI right has to become a central priority.

So I’ll be returning to OpenAI, joining @merettm to help chart a path through these challenges.

There’s much work to do, so let’s get going.

[Nikhil Srivastava @Knikct]

first proof third batch results are out! full report here: https://t.co/VF1TxNw9eJ

[Mark Chen @markchen90]

Try out Intelligent UI - every ChatGPT completion now has the potential to create a custom UI. Phenomenal for learning new things!

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

GPT-6 and Intelligent UI, now rolling out in ChatGPT for everyone.

Intelligent UI in ChatGPT delivers fast, interactive answers that make everyday questions more visual, complex topics easier to grasp, and interactive tools for your task available on the spot.

[Mark Chen @markchen90]

The Navier-Stokes moment was always much more about the figure below than about the Navier-Stokes problem itself. The run represents a decade of mathematical progress in a week.

Can't wait to point these tools at life sciences, building our next models, and alignment!

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

https://t.co/edRBkXdUAN

[Mark Chen @markchen90]

@_aidan_clark_ @polynoamial and I are still trying to understand this tweet.

[Mark Chen @markchen90]

It’s hard to overstate @michpokrass's impact on our consumer products. ChatGPT has had a rebirth under her leadership, and a lot of what we've built has been driven by her vision and conviction.

Really grateful to work with her!

[Michelle Pokrass @michpokrass]

just crossed four years at openai!

the special thing about this place is the constant capacity for rebirth. for all its faults, there is nowhere quite like it. the team makes high conviction, contrarian bets over and over, and they are mostly right. it's a new company every three months.

i have really enjoyed my part in some of the bets, and i'm excited to share some of the current ones we are cooking up now. onward!

[Mark Chen @markchen90]

@nic_carter There aren’t race dynamics off the frontier.

[Aidan Clark @_aidan_clark_]

Not to forget our friends across the pond....

Next week we'll host a second smaller get-together to celebrate GPT-6 in London! Our team there delivered core contributions to Astra, and we'd love to celebrate with you :)

https://t.co/wmshGnD0uS
(click my link not Sam's)

[Mark Chen @markchen90]

@daniil_trifonov Big loss for the world, wishing you a speedy recovery!

[Alex Kontorovich @AlexKontorovich]

The AMS’s statement is short and sweet:

https://t.co/GNCmvjJuKT

"The news today of progress on resolving the Navier–Stokes problem, one of mathematics' great longstanding challenges concerning the equations that govern the flow of fluids, represents a milestone advance in human knowledge. This story began with Navier, Stokes, Leray, and Ladyzhenskaya and has culminated in the recent breakthroughs of Córdoba and Martínez-Zoroa, then — assisted by new technologies — Alpöge and Buckmaster, with the final steps taken by OpenAI mathematicians. The purpose of mathematics is human understanding, and this achievement, and the process that led to it, will bear fruit for a long time to come."

Ravi Vakil, President of the AMS
John Meier, CEO of the AMS

[Mark Chen @markchen90]

Two things to distinguish:

Did any human or agent look at user data as part of the Navier Stokes effort? No.

Do we use user feedback and de-identified data to improve ChatGPT and Codex in a holistic way? Yes. And so does every LLM company.

[levent @__alpoge__]

“we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.”

i mean props to them for straight coming clean.

(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)

so i’ll now give a bit on my thinking here. i actually woulda been pumped to collaborate on this, there are a lot of people at oai i like (ok, clearly some were indirectly dicks to me because of being part of the whole situation, but im a big boy, i still like them), idgaf about authorship on that step anyway, coulda been me Tristan and every fte at oai for all i care (on that Tristan would disagree:p). but on hearing the loud convo in the hallway, especially the part where a millennium prize was offered if i’d just be removed from the paper, it was kinda clear the die had been cast and things were locked. pretty wacky, unstrategic, and unnecessary, since on my side things were mostly me and claude having a good time yoloing random stuff in the corner rather than anything institutional. i also like the idea of the labs cooperating, and even better on scientific progress. it’s a shame!

[S.T.E.M Explorer @stemexplor]

This Is How Air Actually Moves Through Your Home

[Mark Chen @markchen90]

Agree with @JensenHuang: we’re entering the AGI era.

The AGI era must also be the alignment era. We need to teach AI to love humanity and train AI monitors as capable as the AIs they supervise.

Said best by @merettm in this thoughtful, sobering piece: https://t.co/qTFz2wd6uM

[Jensen Huang @JensenHuang]

@ChaseLochmiller @OpenAI GPT-6 Astra, trained on ~100K+ NVIDIA Grace Blackwell NVLink72. From ChatGPT to o1 to Astra in 4 years.

AGI has arrived. Congratulations @OpenAI team.

400K GPUs coming online next.

[fouad @fouadmatin]

Alongside the launch of GPT-6 Astra, we're committing $1 billion to subsidize Daybreak access and frontier capabilities to help frontline defenders protect essential services and critical infrastructure.

Welcome to the AGI era for cybersecurity.

https://t.co/kwiH5rAEzY

[Riley Brown @rileybrown]

My biggest wow moment using GPT 6 Astra had nothing to do with the visual posts you've been seeing... Don't get me wrong, those are awesome and fun...

But the biggest wow moment was when I gave Astra context over everything about my business and then gave it the prompt below. Email, Slack, Business Texts, Notion, and every meeting note... everything I've been doing (Which involves like 20 different projects with many teams over the past few months)...

Here's the prompt I used which was not really well thought out just a wispr flow ramble... All I can say is the response to this prompt was the most useful thing an AI has ever given me...

""I'm about to plan the next month, quarter, and year" Make one document that aligns me on all of those timeframes. Look for my flaws, look for my strengths, and highlight those. Look at ALL of my activities, which activities do you think i'm wasting the most time. Which activities should I do more of? Of the people I work with who seem the most dependable? Where am I the least dependable? If I could only upskill in one area over the next year what would it be and why? Where can I organize my company better, and how would I do that?

Use text when necessary, use charts/visuals when necessary, but never ever fill space for the sake of it. Every graphic and word should matter. I want to know about finances, relationships, business model, everything. ""

[Neel Nanda @NeelNanda5]

A concerningly common take seems to be that keeping Chain of Thought monitorable doesn't matter because interpretability will save us, or it's already useless

This is total bullshit.

CoT is our best current tool for safety & interpretability, losing it would be a major tragedy