GoKawiilThe AI giant claims to have solved one of maths’ trickiest problems, but questions swirl over should get the credit. Plus, an atlas of every single DNA letter mutation in humans and why more bioengineered microorganisms aren’t making it out of the lab.
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A swirling vortex — involved in the solution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem.Credit: OpenAI
OpenAI says that it has shown that the Navier–Stokes equations — which describe the motion of fluids — can break down. Whether or not this could happen is considered one of the trickiest problems in mathematics, and it was on a list of ‘Millennium Prize’ challenges. The US artificial-intelligence company published a preprint that describes a spinning fluid system that ramps up to infinite speeds in a finite amount of time — something that would be impossible in real life. Mathematicians have hailed the achievement, but some are getting weary of science-by-press-release. “I would much rather see a professional level preprint appear on a standard server such as the arXiv, or a talk presented by the authors at a conference,” says mathematician Terence Tao.
Meanwhile, the preprint kicked off a debate about who should get credit for the solution. OpenAI researcher Sébastien Bubeck was open about the fact that his team was spurred on by rumours that researchers at a competing company, Anthropic, were close to a solution of a Millennium Prize problem. Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster, who worked on the Navier–Stokes problem with Levent Alpöge, a researcher affiliated with Anthropic, as a “purely personal collaboration”, says he got in touch with OpenAI. The company offered to put his name on its preprint, he says — but only if Alpöge’s didn't appear. The preprint was published with only the company listed as an author.
Nature | 7 min read & Science | 11 min read
Reference: OpenAI preprint (not peer reviewed)
They say Rome wasn’t built in a day, but the Moon might have taken just five hours to form from the debris of a collision between Earth and a Mars-sized space rock. Simulations have tended to focus on the size of proto-Earth and ‘Theia’, the body that evidence suggests once struck our home planet. If Earth and Theia were both hot and smooshy, the chunks that eventually formed the Moon would have stayed largely intact — making it form more quickly — than if the two smashees were cool.
Live Science | 8 min read
Reference: The Astrophysical Journal Letters paper
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