A Striking Breakthrough in Just 88 Hours... Solving a 90-Year Mathematical Enigma Shocks the Mathematics World

[Anchor]

OpenAI's artificial intelligence model has provided a solution to a global mathematical enigma that mathematicians have failed to solve for over 90 years. The global mathematical community is in a stir over the news that the problem was solved in a mere 88 hours.

Reporter Choi Seung-hun investigates how the artificial intelligence managed to solve this challenge.

[Reporter]

When you stir water in a cup, a vortex like this forms.

Now, let us imagine this vortex crowding into an increasingly smaller space.

Can the speed of the water become infinitely fast?

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

These equations, which describe the movement of water and air, are widely used in aircraft design, weather forecasting, and blood flow analysis.

However, it has never been proven whether a singularity can occur under specific conditions where velocity increases indefinitely.

Back 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, which outperforms the Astra model revealed some time ago, to tackle this problem.

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

Simply converted using Astra's pricing, this amounts to 6.5 million dollars, or roughly 9.1 billion won.

As a result, they announced that they proved the existence of a singularity where, upon applying a specific force, the vortex concentrates in a narrow region and the velocity increases infinitely.

However, controversies over originality have also emerged.

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 OpenAI stated that it did not directly use the research in question, it 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 mathematical verification process that 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 Yoon-sung, Design: Seo Seung-hyun)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.