GoKawiil
Tech News
OpenAI recently claimed its AI agents produced a solution addressing the Navier-Stokes equations, one of math's unsolved Millennium Problems, after running 10,000 agents for 88 hours. Mathematicians including Oxford's James Maynard and Brown's Javier Gómez-Serrano say the resulting proof, while apparently technically correct, is written in a form that is extremely difficult for humans to interpret or learn from.
A group of prominent mathematicians, including Timothy Gowers, Ravi Vakil and Edward Witten, has launched the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, based at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and online at agmai.org. The group aims to advise AI companies on how they present and release mathematical results and to serve as a communication channel between the mathematics community and the AI industry.
In a guest post, 3Blue1Brown creator Grant Sanderson argues that as AI systems become capable of generating proofs without genuine understanding, mathematicians should formalize and reward 'motivated explanations' as academic work on par with solving open problems. He contends this shift would better reflect what mathematicians actually contribute beyond just producing correct proofs.
OpenAI announced that its most advanced AI model produced a mathematical proof that the Navier–Stokes equations, which describe fluid flow, can generate a singularity — a point of physically impossible infinite speed. Mathematician George Karniadakis calculated that for air this breakdown occurs at a vortex width of about 70 nanometres, roughly the distance a molecule travels before colliding with another.
OpenAI announced it had solved part of the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem using an AI system, but the announcement via press release drew criticism for lacking transparency about verification and prior human contributions. Hours earlier, mathematicians Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge said they had reached a partial solution using AI tools from both OpenAI and Anthropic, raising questions about who deserves credit for the breakthrough.
Almost 5,000 mathematicians, including 25 Fields medalists, signed a declaration titled 'A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics,' arguing that AI's success at solving famous problems is being mistaken for genuine mathematical progress. They contend that solving problems is merely a proxy for the real goal of conceptual insight, and that rapid AI-generated 'true/false' outputs could crowd out the slower work of idea generation rather than advance it.
Twenty-five Fields Medal winners signed a letter titled 'A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics,' arguing that AI companies rush out proof announcements—reportedly including a claimed solution to the Navier-Stokes problem attributed to OpenAI—without proper writeups, credit to prior work, or space for conceptual understanding. The commentary piece agrees with the medalists' critique of AI companies but turns the argument back on the mathematics community itself, noting the irony that the letter was also released hastily without consultation, and questioning whether academia has truly nurtured students and ideas as it claims to value.
Caltech is organizing a 40-hour event called Mathathon, running October 30 to November 1, where about 100 teams will use frontier AI models with over $2 million in compute credits to tackle open mathematical conjectures. Teams will present their findings to leading mathematicians, who will judge their understanding and rigor, with prizes awarded initially and again later once results are independently verified by the math community.