Math professor accuses OpenAI of copying his work, says AI compute power makes racing to publish ‘pointless.’ 

NEW YORK POST

OpenAI stunned the mathematics world when it announced Tuesday that its artificial intelligence model cracked a legendary math problem left unsolved for nearly a century in just 88 hours.

But an NYU academic has chimed in — saying the AI giant tried to strong-arm him into helping the bots solve the dizzyingly complex equation, and may have cribbed the work he had already done.

The ChatGPT creator on Tuesday claimed its AI had solved a so-called Millennium Prize Problem — one of seven famous unsolved math problems designated in 2000 by the Clay Mathematics Institute, which offers a $1 million bounty for devising the correct solution to each.

Currently in dispute is the claim over who solved what is known as the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, which asks “whether smooth, three-dimensional fluid flows can always maintain smooth behavior or if they can develop a singularity with infinite velocity,” according to OpenAI.

However professor Tristan Buckmaster, a British-Australian researcher who trained in Germany, has come forward alleging OpenAI may have copied his work after asking him to collaborate — with one of the company’s scientists allegedly warning he might “ruin his career” if he refused.

Buckmaster had been working with Long Island-raised math prodigy Levent Alpöge, a researcher with OpenAI rival Anthropic, on a different elusive fluid dynamics equation, known as the Euler problem, when he found a solution using AI tools from both Anthropic and ChatGPT.

He said scientists from OpenAI approached him and tried to convince him to jointly announce the solution, claiming they had independently solved Navier-Stokes.

Buckmaster questioned the timing of their finding the solution in a blog post, noting OpenAI had only done so “in the past few days” — after the company became aware of his work.

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