"Just 88 Hours" Drastic Shortening... "A 90-Year-Old Puzzle?" Mathematics Community 'Stunned'

[Anchor]

OpenAI's artificial intelligence model has presented a solution to a world-class math puzzle that mathematicians have failed to solve for over 90 years. The global mathematics community is abuzz with the news that the problem was solved in a mere 88 hours.

Reporter Choi Seung-hun investigates how the AI managed to solve this problem.

[Reporter]

Stirring water in a cup like this creates a whirlpool.

Now, let us imagine this whirlpool concentrating into an increasingly smaller space.

Can the speed of water become infinitely fast?

This is the 90-year-old puzzle known as the Navier-Stokes equations.

Widely used in aircraft design, weather forecasting, and blood flow analysis, these equations describe the motion of water and air.

However, it has not been proven whether a singularity can occur where the speed increases indefinitely under specific conditions.

In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute selected seven Millennium Prize Problems, including this one, and offered a reward of 1 million dollars for each.

OpenAI deployed an unreleased AI model with superior performance to Astra, which was unveiled recently.

About 10,000 AI agents were deployed, using 2.7 million messages and 130 billion output tokens over 88 hours.

Simply converted at Astra rates, this amounts to 6.5 million dollars, or approximately 9.1 billion won in Korean currency.

As a result, they announced that they proved the formation of a singularity where applying a specific force concentrates the whirlpool into a narrow region, causing the speed to increase endlessly.

However, controversies over originality have also arisen.

Professor Tristan Buckmaster of New York University raised questions, stating that he was conducting similar research using OpenAI's model and wondering whether this data might have influenced the outcome.

While stating that the specific research was not directly used, OpenAI did not rule out the possibility that de-identified data may have been used to improve the model.

[Interview / Kang Moon-jin / Professor, Department of Mathematical Sciences, KAIST: We cannot simply say that AI solved it in 88 hours without any background knowledge. In fact, many mathematicians have made tremendous progress, and recently we were practically almost there.]

Because it has not undergone the verification process by the mathematics community which typically takes at least two years, the institute has not yet officially recognized the solution.

OpenAI explained, "The very fact that we are talking about a Millennium Problem is an example of how far AI has come and how rapidly it is developing."

(Video Editing: Kim Yun-sung, Design: Seo Seung-hyun)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.