From Buckmaster's text:
The route to the Clay problem through a
smooth force, options c and d in Fefferman’s statement of the problem, is the
route Luis and Diego opened and the one Levent and I had quietly chosen to
attack. Almost nobody else I know of was working on it. It is not the direction
one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement. When I
heard “forced,” it was a bright red flag.
This is much more than the knowledge than the problem can be solved, it's also the specific, non-obvious approach to solving it. That's much more damning for OpenAI, if confirmed.[flagged]
That's a stretch. The Luis and Diego paper was published in 2023 and is included in every frontier model's training dataset. An AI model could independently choose the same path route as Luis and Diego, without access to Buckmaster and Alpöge’s work.
And the article states "an insane amount of compute had been used," which implies OpenAI brute-forced their way to a solution. I.e. they searched for every paper published on Navier-Stokes and exhaustively attempted every approach. Such an approach would lead them to a solution.
There is not enough information at this time to reach a conclusion. The best option is to wait for statements from both sides, then reevaluate.