OpenAI’s Artificial Intelligence Solves One of The Millennium Prize Problems - teleSUR English

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September 10, 2026 Hour: 8:26 am

The work of two Spanish mathematicians was essential to finding a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem.

On Wednesday, Spanish mathematicians Diego Cordoba and Luis Martinez Zoroa praised the recognition OpenAI has given to their contributions, which enabled its artificial intelligence agents to solve the Navier-Stokes equation, one of the Millennium Prize Problems.

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They insisted that without their previous contributions, no AI would have been able to solve the problem, but also that without artificial intelligence, humans would have taken much longer to find the solution.

On Tuesday, the U.S. tech company said one of its AI models had found a solution to the problem, a discovery made by a model that has not yet been publicly introduced and that is more capable than the GPT-6 model recently launched.

The publication of these results has nevertheless generated strong controversy, both over whether the findings actually constitute a definitive solution to this mathematical problem and over who the true authors are. Critics argue that OpenAI used advances made by other scientists, including some that may even have been unpublished.

Although reviewing and verifying the OpenAI work will require several months, Cordoba and Zoroa explained that there are already several artificial intelligence models that interpret mathematical language and make it possible to know the result in a very short time. “Yes, they have solved it,” they acknowledged.

The Navier-Stokes problem is a mathematical challenge that has for decades sought to prove whether the equations describing the movement of water and air always have well-behaved solutions or whether they can break down and become infinite.

Created in the 19th century, the Navier-Stokes formulas seek to study fluids and use the laws of physics to calculate velocity and pressure. For years, they have been used to simulate the movement of the sea, wind or smoke, but until now no one had been able to prove whether those equations always work properly in three dimensions.

Because of its complexity, the Navier-Stokes problem was designated as one of the Millennium Prize Problems, and the Clay Mathematics Institute offered US$1 million to anyone who solved it.

Following OpenAI’s announcement that it would not seek the prize money, the two Spanish mathematicians said they have neither contacted the company nor been contacted by it.

They also said they have not considered seeking any reward for the work they carried out that served as the basis for unraveling the problem. “We are not here for money,” Cordoba said.

After some researchers criticized the company for basing its discovery on the work of other scientists, OpenAI explained that those clues were related to the work of Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge and New York University mathematician Tristan Buckmaster, who had made progress on the so-called “forced Euler” problem, which is also related to fluid dynamics but is different from the Navier-Stokes problem.

OpenAI also said that neither its researchers nor its AI agents had access to their work until they published it. Although it considers it “unlikely,” OpenAI does not rule out “that anonymized data derived from the use of our products may have contributed to improving our models.”

The company did not initially cite the contributions of the two Spanish mathematicians, which have been very widely recognized by numerous scientists and scientific societies, including the American Mathematical Society, which has highlighted the significance of the discovery and the contributions of Alpöge, Buckmaster, Cordoba, and Martinez Zoroa.

teleSUR/ JF

Source: EFE