On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

Blog · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-09-10)

• The core argument frames a controversy where OpenAI allegedly “scooped” a team (Buckmaster and Alpöge) on the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, potentially leveraging rumors of their progress and raising serious questions about AI labs’ data usage policies and competitive ethics.
• Simon draws an analogy to computer security, suggesting that “just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit,” and now “just knowing that there is an unpublished solution to a problem might trigger millions of dollars in LLM spending to get there first.”
• The incident highlights Simon’s “ongoing frustrations” with the vague explanation of how user data is “used to improve model performance,” especially regarding the potential for user work to influence models that then benefit competitors.
• A practical warning is encapsulated in the hypothetical: “If I use ChatGPT to help me partially solve a Millennium Prize problem, what are the chances that my work will influence training such that a later model helps someone else solve it first?”