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Comment by pietz | Hacker News Reader

I find the claims from OpenAI somehow more relatable and reasonable.

- They threw compute on a problem another team/company was rumored to have solved to see what their secret model could do.

- The texts I read do make it seem like OpenAI wanted to talk and share credit generously.

- Imagine working on a frontier math problem with someone at Anthropic and not only do you use Codex but also through a non-business account that allows training on your data.

- Timeline-wise, if they mainly used GPT 5.6 it's unlikely any meaningful data made it into an model that's being internally validated right now.

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It’s fishy though that they heard one of seven problems was about to be solved and threw perhaps 15 million bucks at the right one.

[Edit: they said "two of": "On Tuesday, September 1, we heard rumors that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved. .. we launched an effort ... on all open Millennium Prize problems".]

Why in the world is that fishy?

Isn't that exactly what almost everyone would do given that they wanted to see how capable their model is and the tense competition they have with Anthropic right now? Stealing impressive headlines from your competitor is pure gold.

If they were willing to spend 105 million it, perhaps. But that would be surprising. It’s fishy because they spent something like 15 million on the right one.

Again, that is the point. There is rumours that this one thing would be solvable, so they focus on this, spending 15m on one specific thing, instead of 105m on many. How is that fishy?

I understood the rumors (as described by OpenAI) to be that “one of” the prizes was solvable. If they heard NS specifically was solvable and aren’t saying that, they’re intentionally obfuscating that.

Because that’s the one Anthropic was rumored to have solved.

"On Tuesday, September 1, we heard rumors that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved. Inspired by these rumors and by the step change in performance of our internal model, we launched an effort to evaluate it on all open Millennium Prize problems and a few other high-impact problems."

That doesn't reject my claim. They just didn't name them in this post. It feels like, you're going through great lengths reading something into this.

No, sorry I was reading it correctly but they addressed the issue in the post itself. They make it clear they were aiming at all 7 problems looking for the "two" that were rumored to be solved. But they didn't go hog on NS until they made progress. See sibling comments. I misread it the first time to be a claim that they "heard one of 7 human intractable problems are solved and spent 15 million on the right one".

Didn't they say that they launched an effort to evaluate their model on all open Millennium Prize problems, and then narrowed down to Navier-Stokes as the most promising after seeing results on simplified versions of the problems?

Yes, you're right. It seems like they claim to have started broadly and narrowed it down based on some progress. That leads to different questions but does answer my initial "fishy" point.

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