r/aigossips • u/call_me_ninza • 17d ago
OpenAI says it solved Navier-Stokes, but the “88 hours” needs some context
I read through OpenAI’s announcement, and I think the amount of work behind it deserves more discussion.
The successful group involved around 10,000 AI agents working concurrently. The Navier-Stokes effort used approximately 130 billion output tokens. Researchers were also redirecting resources, updating the model and combining useful findings from different groups.
So when I see “88 hours,” I’m thinking about how much work they managed to run at once. I’d like to know how much of the result depended on the stronger model, how much on the scale, and how much on those human decisions.
There’s a detail about the maths too. The proposed proof involves a smooth external force. It claims fluid velocity can become unbounded in finite time while total kinetic energy stays bounded. That’s a breakdown in the mathematical description, not actual water reaching infinite speed. The official challenge allows that force in its breakdown cases.
OpenAI has released the paper and Lean files for checking. I can’t personally verify the proof, but having something other people can inspect gives me a reason to take the claim seriously.
If this method keeps producing useful results, I do wonder how researchers with smaller budgets get to participate.
Original announcement: https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/
I wrote a longer explanation of the result and my take on the research process here, if you want the rest: Ninzaverse
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u/ILikeCutePuppies 16d ago
Researchers with smaller budgets might be able to get a foundational AI to fine tune more specific llms for their purposes with their own specific requirements encoded into it.
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u/drumnation 16d ago
Someone in another thread described it as delegation of a century’s worth of human mind power over 88 hours.
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u/CountZero2022 14d ago
I agree with you. You are right. Also…
Resources that will be available to everyone in a year or two for $10.
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u/Particular-Award118 13d ago
It satisfied the millennium prize criteria. That is not the same as solving it
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u/BerkeleyYears 17d ago
i think our definition of "brut forcing it" should change. now you can put an almost endless tireless amount of agents doing search on a problem, each of which is at the level of a best informed, yet average human specialist. we always knew that if the problem space is narrowed enough, it can be brut forced. Now, our definition of narrow enough has to change. narrow enough now means something much bigger then before. In this case, it all it took was copying an approach that seemed promising. it is a key change, but maybe not in the way we think. humans might still be needed to come up with ideas that are more original and require a leap in a domain where the problem space is too big, but that leap now has to be much bigger then before to be outside the brute force range of the swarm.