It took OpenAI's agents 130 billion tokens to crack a 90-year-old math problem

OpenAI wanted to see if its agents could solve a long unsettled math problem. After gobbling billions of tokens, it found a solution.

It took OpenAI's agents 130 billion tokens to crack a 90-year-old math problem

TL;DR

  • OpenAI claims its AI agents solved the Navier-Stokes equations.
  • Solving this 90-year-old problem was estimated to cost between $10 million and $40 million.
  • The AI's effort involved 2.7 million messages, 10,000 concurrent agents, and 88 hours of work, plus 17 hours for verification.
  • Mathematicians Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge have questioned OpenAI's use of their research data.
  • OpenAI denies direct access to their work but acknowledges that de-identified data from product usage might have improved models.