That's beyond naive. The money this would mean for OpenAI (and the money they've already spent)...
Why would you risk the trillions of dollars worth of business for the niche result of Navier-Stokes, which your average person cannot differentiate from a JEMS paper?
So to be fair, if Anthropic is *also* doing this (quite likely!) then Sholto would have a very strong incentive to try and spin it as highly unlikely that any of the big AI labs are possibly doing this.
His prior work predating OpenAI's interest in the problem was ingested over the last year as he made progress and used for training.
Then, with a prompting nudge from OpenAI's team who acknowledged hearing about the direction "Anthropic" (his co-collaborator) had been pursuing, they're able to point their giant amount of compute towards a known promising path to a proof and crossing the finish line first.