Math is difficult. And apparently expensive.
On Tuesday, OpenAI said its agents had done so solved the Navier-Stokes equationsa 90-year-old set of mathematical formulas that can predict how liquids and gases move. It’s so complicated that the Clay Mathematics Institute has offered a solution Prize of 1 million dollars for every mathematician who finds the solution.
OpenAI said finding the solution required a lot of resources. The coordinating AI agents sent 2.7 million messages as they worked on the evidence. The effort involved approximately 10,000 simultaneous officers and a resolution was reached after 88 hours. The verification took another 17 hours.
Such intensive use of AI is not cheap. In a post on Including the much larger volume of input tokens, the post estimated the total could reach $10 million to $40 million.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded, joking that AI was a bubble.
OpenAI’s announcement that this is the case solved the age-old math problem was celebrated within the AI industry. It has also drawn criticism after two mathematicians – Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge – raised questions about how OpenAI used their related research data to train its models.
OpenAI denied direct access to their work, but said it “cannot rule out that anonymized data derived from their use of our products helped improve our models.”
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
