IBL News | New York
OpenAI said on Tuesday that its newest AI technology solved one of the “Millennium Problems,” a collection of unanswered math questions meant to push the world’s leading mathematicians to new heights.
The company’s announcement is the most dramatic sign yet that AI is fundamentally transforming the field of higher mathematics, long considered a pinnacle of human achievement.
“This is a spectacular culmination of the arc we have seen over the past twelve months,” OpenAI researcher Sebastian Bubeck said of the company’s new solution.
Related to a set of equations about fluid mechanics, the “Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem” has long ranked among the great unsolved problems in mathematics. This problem involves a series of equations that are often used to predict the weather.
The equations describe the movement of water and other liquids. The Navier-Stokes problem, which has no clear practical value, asks whether these equations completely break down in certain situations.
The company announced that one of its latest models, which has not yet been released to the public, needed just 88 hours to solve what mathematicians call “the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem.”