It took OpenAI's agents 130 billion tokens to crack a 90-year-old math problem

Math is hard. And, apparently, expensive.

On Tuesday, OpenAI said its agents had solved the Navier-Stokes equations, a 90-year-old group of mathematical formulas that tin foretell really liquids and gases move. It's truthful analyzable that the Clay Mathematics Institute has offered a $1 cardinal prize to immoderate mathematician who finds the solution.

OpenAI said that uncovering the solution required a batch of resources. Its coordinating AI agents sent 2.7 cardinal messages while moving connected the proof. The effort progressive astir 10,000 concurrent agents and reached a solution aft 88 hours. Verification took different 17 hours.

Such intensive usage of AI doesn't travel cheap. In a station connected X, LisanBench, an LLM benchmark evaluator, estimated that the output tokens unsocial would costs astir $6.5 cardinal astatine OpenAI's mean user price. Including the acold larger measurement of input tokens, the station estimated the full could scope $10 cardinal to $40 million.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman replied, joking that AI was a bubble.

OpenAI's announcement that it solved the age-old mathematics problem was celebrated wrong the AI industry. It's besides been wide criticized aft 2 mathematicians — Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge — raised questions astir really OpenAI utilized their related investigation information to train its models.

OpenAI denied nonstop entree to their work, but said that it "cannot norm retired that de-identified information derived from their usage of our products helped amended our models."

The institution didn't instantly respond to a petition for remark from Business Insider.