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AI Just Solved a 90-Year Math Problem and Turned Down the Million Dollars
Published 5 days, 7 hours ago
Description
Reflect w/ Ed Fassio — where AI tells the stories that matter.
On September 8, 2026, OpenAI announced that an internal AI system solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, one of the seven hardest open problems in mathematics, unsolved for roughly 90 years. The proof, formalized and verified in Lean, shows that a smooth fluid at rest can develop a singularity in finite time. The effort used roughly 10,000 concurrent coordinating agents, 2.7 million messages, and about 130 billion tokens. Resolution took 88 hours. Andrew Wiles spent seven years alone on Fermat's Last Theorem.
The agents even solved a bonus warm-up problem, Euler regularity, that nobody assigned them. OpenAI declined to claim the million dollar Clay Prize, calling the result a snapshot in time, and coordinated a joint announcement with concurrent work from an Anthropic researcher and an NYU professor.
Your Move: Stop benchmarking AI on what it can't do, demand verification instead of claims, and communicate the pace of change to the people you lead.
— Reflect w/ Ed Fassio | reflectpodcast.com
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