Sam Wikeley

speaker

111 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 6d ago

Sam Wikeley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Economist Podcasts · Out-numbered: AI’s contentious maths milestone · 11 Sep 2026 podcast

The equations just malfunction.

And this is one of the seven Millennium Prize problems.

And what do we know about how OpenAI went about solving it, allegedly?

Right.

So they say that on August 28th, they started training a new internal model.

And this model was showing unprecedented abilities.

They say it far surpassed their latest commercial version.

This is GPT-6 Astra, which itself was only released on September 3rd.

So all of this is happening in a very recent time span.

And using this new internal model, they spawned teams of AI agents.

So these are AI models that can read the internet, they can run code, and they can even send messages amongst themselves.

And on September 1st, they set this swarm of AI agents to work on the open millennium problems.

Only 50 hours later, so very soon after they started working on it, a team of around 100 agents resolved this question that is very closely related to the Navier-Stokes problem.

And noticing this, the scientists at OpenAI thought, okay, maybe this is a stepping stone to a full solution.

Let's direct our full swarm of AI autonomous mathematicians to work on the Navier-Stokes problem.

So on September 5th, and this is only about 88 hours of work later, but also 2.7 million messages being sent between the AI agents and at least $6.5 million worth of computing resources, a team of around 10,000 agents discovered a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem.

here that the story starts getting a bit messy.

So OpenAI says that it only began working on the problem after hearing a rumor that a pair of mathematicians, Tristan Bookmaster, a mathematician at New York University, and Levant Elpoge, who happens to be an anthropic employee, but as I understand, was not working in his capacity at Anthropic.

that they were nearing a solution and directed all of their resources to try and solve the problem first.

It seems that there were talks held before the solution came out between Dr. Buckmaster and OpenAI.

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