Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematician at New York University, had just spent months working on what he believed could be a life-defining mathematical proof. Then, during a Sept. 6 meeting with OpenAI employees, he claimed he was issued a stark warning: "Why would you ruin your career?"
That exchange, which Buckmaster described in a detailed public statement this week, sits at the heart of a ballooning controversy around a famous set of mathematical equations called Navier-Stokes.
OpenAI says its artificial intelligence (AI) model has solved an outstanding problem tied to this 200-year-old set of fluid dynamics equations. The set of equations appears on the list of one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems posed by the Clay Mathematics Institute, and its solution comes with a $1 million reward. Buckmaster had been working on the same problem. And he has questions about how the company got there so fa...
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