[FRIAM] This week's weird AI news/fight

Sat Sep 12 18:19:24 EDT 2026

Yeah.  I have appreciated some of the journalistic summaries, but am glad Terence Tao has been writing on this:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/07/finite-time-blowup-with-smooth-forcing-term-for-the-incompressible-porous-medium-boussinesq-and-incompressible-euler-equations/
Finite time blowup with smooth forcing term for the incompressible porous medium, Boussinesq, and incompressible Euler equations
terrytao.wordpress.com
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117207849921390904	
Terence Tao (@tao at mathstodon.xyz)
mathstodon.xyz

OpenAI come out of this looking like near-perfect scumbags, a role they have been setting themselves up for in so many ways and at increasing pace lately.  The hard part of it, according to the mathematicians, was understanding a general strategy, which the Spaniards got right.  After that, there was some more, but smaller, strategizing to do, which Buckmaster and Alpoge had mostly figured out, and a lot of intricate proof-checking and organizing that is well suited to the automated methods.  I recall some commentators thought that Buckmaster and Alpoge could probably have completed that with the Codex tool on timescales of some additional weeks or months, from where they already were.

So OpenAI’s deciding to make this a one-up over the mathematician who happened to be an Anthropic employee is about like somebody’s entering a motorcycle in the Olympic 100m dash and crowing that it was faster than the runners.  It’s trump’s kind of crassness, which just misses the point of any sort of value as understood by non-degraded people.  It reminds me of the Chinese officials coming and walking through sand paintings that Tibetan monks were working up, not because they cared one way or another, but just as performative abuse.  There’s something very Dunning-Kruger about all this, to me.  

It’s a shame this will never achieve the penetrance of fairy tales or other folk memes.  The storyline is kind of ideal.

Eric

> On Sep 13, 2026, at 6:58, Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Bizarre AI news you might have missed this week: 
> Lots of sketchiness surrounds OpenAI announcement that it solved a "Millennial Challenge" math problem that comes with a $1,000,000 prize. Specifically, they answered a question about the 200-year-old Navier-Stokes equation, which describes significant aspects of fluid dynamics. How does it get sketchy Well.... 
> First off, they used around 300,000,000,000 output tokens, which would cost a consumer around $22,000,000. Yes, twenty-two million dollars. This fuelled 10,000 AI agents working on the problem for around 90 straight hours. 
> Second, the AI people think this is *super* important, because Silicon Valley has become heavily invested in the idea that if AI can "solve math" that will prove it is *really* super intelligent. 
> Third, there were at least two mathematicians working on... let's just say... "remarkably similar" solutions, within a related AI codex. When confronted about this, OpenAI's researchers immediately and emphatically stated that that the model did not "look up user data." OpenAI was pressed again, that the question wasn't if the user was anonymized, but if it had access to the work they were doing. OpenAI has equivocated about that. At this point, it seems highly likely that OpenAI trained their model with access to the human researcher's work, essentially swooping in at the last minute to try to claim the prize, while the restrictions on data access mostly just ensure no one can prove what they did or didn't steal. 
> It's so sketchy that the OpenAI scientist (Bubeck) offered to allow the primary challenging mathematician (Buckmaster) credit if the mathematician removed any mention of competing AI from his description of his work. When the mathematician refused, the OpenAI scientist threatened to ruin his career. 
> Another mathematician (Thom) has accused OpenAI of being dishonest about whether his conversations with ChatGPT on the same topic became part of the training data. 
> Here is an example article (there have been many). 
> 
> 
> The Fight Over OpenAI’s Math Breakthrough Is a New Kind of Scientific Arms Race <https://gizmodo.com/the-fight-over-openais-math-breakthrough-is-a-new-kind-of-scientific-arms-race-2000809240>
> 
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