alt Hacker NewsBecause the core of the issue is that it may well not have solved it, but instead plagiarised the significant step of the result from other researchers
That's why nobody's talking about how impressive this is, because its not nearly as impressive of a piece of work to simply cobble together other peoples' work that didn't know you were doing it. I could have republished relativity from einstein's notes, but people would correctly not be impressed with my ability
Until the plagiarism scandal is sorted out, its not a meaningful result at all, because nobody knows how much genuine innovation these models are displaying
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> but instead plagiarised the significant step of the result from other researchers
Isn't that how research works? Everything is built on the shoulders of the ones that came before, attribution is a real problem (I don't know if OpenAI released a paper citing the previous contributions, I'm assuming not but they should), but using previous maths to prove new maths shouldn't be controversial
The other researchers themselves were also using AI. That's why it was potentially available to be plagiarized.
There is no human only proof of this.
It is very unlikely to be plagiarized, and claims of plagiarism are largely unfounded and show a lack of understanding of the situation. They fall apart when reviewing the timeline, and what was actually solved.
This is the timeline:
On June 29, Buckmaster opted out of model training, and stopped allowing his chats to be used as training data with OpenAI https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/11723341370570119...
On August 15, Buckmaster and Alpöge found their blow-up for 3D incompressible Euler with forcing https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf
In late August, OpenAI completed a pretrain of its latest internal model. A model derived from this pretrain, built after August 28, found a solution to 3D incompressible Euler without forcing and Navier-Stokes with forcing. https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/
To explain who solved what (I copied from here: https://x.com/IlinVasily29521/status/2097554700321329393 )
Tristan + Levent: 3D incompressible Euler with forcing
OpenAI: 3D incompressible Euler without forcing
OpenAI: Navier-Stokes with forcing
No one: Navier-Stokes without forcing
Tristan+Levent ticked the weakest case, OpenAI ticked the two next weakest, then the final case is unsolved. Only the last two are eligible for the Millennium Prize. The Navier-Stokes general case remains unsolved.
Buckmaster disabled model training long before the August 15 breakthrough results, so these chats were not used as training data for OpenAI's model which solved Navier-Stokes.
Additionally, Tristan and Levent only solved the easiest version of the problem and did not have the key insights to solve the harder versions of the problem required for the Millennium Prize.
And OpenAI directly addressed these plagiarism claims, and called them impossible: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/science/tristan-buckmaste...
"We can say categorically that it is impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training."
> Because the core of the issue is that it may well not have solved it, but instead plagiarised the significant step of the result from other researchers
It's also true however that I haven't seen a single write up trying to discern what did more of the work in those AI chats - the prompts or the responses - bubble to the surface, also since we don't have access to them.
For example, if I prompt Codex with "Make me a website about strawberry cake" and nothing else, and OpenAI announces they have the best strawberry cake minutes before I launch, I'm not sure they plagiarized anything.
We just don't know if this is quibbling over "who prompted first" or if the researchers came up with anything strikingly original by themselves.
who cares about plagiarism? the biggest issue, as described by Terence Tao, is that AI companies don't understand the math they are publishing and do not devote any resources to answering questions about their methods after publishing results and getting a headline. they miss the whole point of mathematics. they do not contribute to the improvement of human understanding of math, perhaps because they are unable to.
Turning a bunch of vague research directions and exploratory prompts into a formalized proof is quite impressive on its own. OpenAI would have no incentive to taint its first math announcement of this magnitude if it knew it were "plagiarizing" another person's work.
People are grasping at straws it seems to dismiss the power of this new model they may have. Hate OpenAI for any reason you want, but denying the capabilities of models has been a losing game for the past 5 years.