'Uproar' unleashed after OpenAI says it solved major maths mystery
The subject of the controversy may be extremely complex, but experts say it boils down to simple issues of trust and ethics.
OpenAI announced it had solved a major mathematical problem, one of six unsolved Millennium Prize Problems, using a new AI model. The company claimed the AI model, consisting of 10,000 AI agents, solved the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem in about 88 hours. However, Australian mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and his colleague Levent Alpöge, who work at Anthropic, claimed they had also been working on the problem with a similar proof method.
Buckmaster and Alpöge stated their work was not plagiarised, but their version of events painted OpenAI in a negative light. OpenAI said it started training its unnamed model about a week after announcing the proof, and they launched an effort to evaluate the model on all open Millennium Prize problems and other high-impact problems.
Buckmaster and Alpöge were aware of these rumours and had contacted OpenAI for clarification. OpenAI's Dr. Bubeck condemned the allegations and promised to say more in a follow-up post, stating he had wanted to coordinate releases with Buckmaster and Alpöge and had suggested Buckmaster be the lead author.
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