OpenAI Says It Has Cracked One of Math’s ‘Millennium Problems’
The company’s announcement is the most dramatic sign yet that artificial intelligence is fundamentally transforming the field of higher mathematics.
The company’s announcement is the most dramatic sign yet that artificial intelligence is fundamentally transforming the field of higher mathematics.
OpenAI said on Tuesday that its newest artificial intelligence technology had solved one of the “Millennium Problems,” a collection of important unanswered math questions meant to push the world’s leading mathematicians to new heights.
The announcement is another clear sign that A.I. is fundamentally changing the upper reaches of mathematics, which have long been viewed as a pinnacle of human achievement. The change has excited some mathematicians, while stirring concern among others.
Over the past year, A.I. systems successfully solved a wide range of problems that have bedeviled mathematicians for decades. But these problems were not as complex, nor as closely watched, as the one that OpenAI’s technology has solved over the past several days. The Millennium Problems are among the most heavily researched in the field.
“This is a spectacular culmination of the arc we have seen over the past twelve months,” OpenAI researcher Sébastien Bubeck said of the company’s new solution.
The company announced that one of its latest models, which has not yet been released to the public, needed just 88 hours to solve what mathematicians call “the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem.” This problem involves a series of equations that are often used to predict the weather.
