'Predatory behavior': Elite mathematicians clash over OpenAI's 'solution' to million-dollar math problem

HEIDELBERG, Germany — Often considered the slowest, most methodical and most abstract of the sciences, mathematics usually advances so incrementally and esoterically that it rarely troubles the mainstream media.

It was therefore with some discomfort that a panel of elite mathematicians took the stage Sept.

15 here at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum , a conference that unites young researchers with award-winning mathematicians and computer scientists.

The focus of the panel: to confront the rapid rise of AI, whose threat to their quiet discipline has thrust them into the limelight.

In the past year alone, AI systems have made substantial contributions to the solutions of dozens of problems posed by prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős , conducted publishable doctoral-level research , formally verified two proofs that had previously won their authors the Fields Medal (an award considered equivalent to a Nobel Prize in mathematics) and made progress on 10 other long-standing tough open problems .

Then, on Sept.

8, OpenAI made the bombshell claim that it had deployed 10,000 AI agents to solve the Navier-Stokes existence-and-smoothness problem , one of seven fiendishly difficult Millennium Prize Problems posed by the Clay Mathematics Institute in the year 2000 (of which only one, the Poincaré conjecture , has been solved to the institute's satisfaction until now).

The prize for solving any of these problems is $1 million.

Crucially, mathematicians Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge had been working on the Navier-Stokes problem for roughly a year when they alleged that OpenAI found out about their work and raced to scoop them , claiming that an OpenAI representative threatened them not to go public.

It is in the bow wave of this news that the Heidelberg Laureate Forum panelists debated the controversy surrounding what the rise of AI means for the future of their discipline.

Addressing the OpenAI announcement head-on from the outset was Michael Harris , a professor of mathematics at Columbia University.

"There's no legal obstacle to the kind of predatory behavior that we've seen particularly over the last month, in the same way there was no legal obstacle in the 19th century to … the violent acquisition of territory by colonial powers," he said.

Harris broke the OpenAI Navier-Stokes story on his Substack newsletter Silicon Reckoner , largely to reveal what he views as an important controversy relating to how OpenAI may have used Buckmaster and Alpöge's research.

Harris, who describes the big tech companies developing AI as "gangsters," would like to see a regulatory framework implemented to protect mathematics and mathematicians from similar actions in future.