OpenAI just wants to win

What happened

OpenAI has spent the last few years planting flags across the increasingly difficult terrain in mathematics. This week, it claimed one of its biggest prizes yet: a solution to a legendary Millennium Prize problem. In normal circumstances, this would have been celebrated as a historic achievement. Instead, many mathematicians have watched OpenAI’s relentless advance with growing unease.

Buckmaster said he was offered practically “unlimited compute” to finish his own work, and the opportunity to be the sole author of OpenAI’s paper announcing the breakthrough, which would of course credit its tools. “All I had to do was throw Levent under the bus,” Buckmaster told The Verge in a phone interview.

He said he flatly rejected Bubeck’s offer, which he viewed as a “bribe,” and also began questioning whether OpenAI may have benefited from his use of Codex, one of the company’s AI tools he had been using to tackle the problem.

OpenAI has denied that anyone — or any agent — accessed his specific user data, and until its more recent comments acknowledged it could not rule out the possibility data derived from his use of the products was used to improve the model. Buckmaster ultimately decided to go public with both his work and his account of OpenAI’s conduct.

His office, he said, had been transformed into something of a “war room,” with colleagues helping scrutinize his mathematics, coordinate outreach, and even get in touch with lawyers. Bubeck has rejected Buckmaster’s characterization of the conversations on social media and in an interview with The New York Times.

He acknowledged offering OpenAI’s resources to help Buckmaster complete his own proof or to have him take over the writing of the company’s. Strikingly, Bubeck said OpenAI had made similar arrangements with other mathematicians, though did not identify them. But his account nevertheless makes clear that Alpöge’s affiliation with Anthropic was a sticking point. ” he told the Times.

Why it matters

To them, the company appears less like an enthusiastic newcomer than an impossibly well-resourced interloper, charging into problems they have dedicated their lives to studying with little apparent regard for long-standing norms or the consequences for those left in its wake. At the heart of that unease is a sense that OpenAI is doing mathematics for different reasons. Mathematicians want to advance the field. OpenAI wants to win.

This week, The Verge spoke with more than a dozen mathematicians, including Tristan Buckmaster and Andreas Thom, who are at the center of recent controversies surrounding OpenAI’s work in the field. Even those skeptical of the most serious allegations described a field shaken by the tech giant’s conduct and fearful of what it might do next in its determination to trounce its rivals.

Buckmaster has accused OpenAI of failing to adequately explain whether work he did through its tool Codex could have contributed to its recent successes. In a statement to The Verge, OpenAI spokesperson Laurance Fauconnet strenuously denied that material from his prompts had played a role: “We can say categorically that it is impossible for Dr. ” Buckmaster remains unconvinced.

“Given their behavior up until this point, one should take such statements with great skepticism,” he said. Mathematics is not normally this dramatic, so how did things get this bad? A rumor was all it took for tensions to boil over. OpenAI says it heard some researchers were making progress on Millennium Prize problems and decided to see whether one of its advanced, unreleased models could make headway too.

It turns out it could. OpenAI says it took roughly 10,000 agents, tens of millions of dollars of compute, and just 88 hours to find a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, which concerns the flow of fluids. The company had also discovered who it was racing against: Buckmaster, an NYU professor, and Levent Alpöge, a researcher at one of its fiercest rivals, Anthropic.

Among several lines of research, the pair were pursuing Navier-Stokes, though had not yet completed a proof. Some details of what happened next are fiercely contested, but the two sides broadly agree on the basic sequence of events. One thing is particularly clear: Alpöge’s involvement was a problem for OpenAI, despite his saying it was a “personal collaboration” independent of his work with Anthropic.

Buckmaster said he contacted OpenAI after learning the company had become aware of their progress and was racing toward a solution of its own. He said discussions with OpenAI researcher Sébastien Bubeck grew contentious and, in his view, threatening, but the company offered a path forward for him — one that excluded Alpöge.

What to watch

If the goal is to compete in mathematics, there are few bigger trophies than solving a Millennium Prize problem. The seven problems, set out by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000, are widely considered among the most formidable challenges in the field. Each carries a $1 million bounty for whoever solves it. Many had already endured decades of intense scrutiny by the time the prizes were established.

In the quarter-century since, only one — the Poincaré conjecture, a topological problem concerning three-dimensional spheres — has fallen.