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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Edit: Guess the rumours about Anthropic solving a Millenium problem that circulated a couple of days ago, were not unfounded.

OpenAI (not Anthropic) has announced a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the 7 Millennium problems.

https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

Relevant paragraph:

”We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem. While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models⁠. However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs unforced).”

Other relevant paragraph:

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.

They started prompting after hearing the rumors, does anyone not think the external mathematician's prompts didn't contrinute to their internal model?

Edit: Even more strange, as of Aug 28, an Open AI guy tweeted that Open AI had already tried mellinnium prize problems with limted tests unsuccessfully. Another breadcrumb suggesting the internal model that they developed included the draft paper in the training data.

I have no idea what OpenAI’s internal data pipelines look like, but I think it’s best to assume that anything you type into the chatbox can and will be used against you by Sam Altman/the government/The Basilisk.

but I think it’s best to assume that anything you type into the chatbox can and will be used by Sam Altman/the government/The Basilisk.

ftfy. There's no reason that them using it would be against you.