OpenAI claims to have solved a Millennium mathematics problem.

OpenAI has announced that one of its artificial intelligence models, not yet released to the public, would have solved the Navier-Stokes problem in a few dozen hours. This is one of the seven Millennium Problems, open and extremely difficult mathematical questions identified by the Clay Mathematics Institute.

The American company speaks of a breakthrough for AI research, but the result has not yet been confirmed by the scientific community. Furthermore, a dispute has already erupted over the true authorship of the discovery with a team linked to rival Anthropic and New York University.

The Navier-Stokes equations describe the motion of fluids, such as air and water, and are fundamental tools in fields ranging from aircraft design to weather forecasting. The problem, formulated in the 19th century, concerns the possibility of finding precise mathematical solutions to these equations in all situations, a challenge that has remained unanswered for generations.

In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute identified seven such 'Millennium' problems, offering a one-million-dollar prize for the solution of each. OpenAI claims that its AI, after about 88 hours of computations costing millions of dollars, has demonstrated that these equations can 'collapse' over time, thereby answering the question. However, the affair emerged in a climate of rivalry: just hours before OpenAI's announcement, other researchers had released work on related equations, accusing OpenAI of having followed their approach.