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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7012 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Navier-Stokes Millenium Problem Solved by GPT

OpenAI says they solved the Navier-Stokes Millenium Prize problem with an internal model that is more powerful than GPT6, so a GPT 7 candidate or something close. OpenAI has been on fire lately really casting a shadow on Anthropic. First the hugging face incident, now the first to crack the Millenium prize problems.

As for the solution to the problem, they are claiming that smoothness is disproved and that the equations do break down.

A fundamental open question for these dynamical equations has been whether the continuum approximation of the fluid can break down. Specifically, can the Navier–Stokes equations for a three-dimensional incompressible fluid with constant density develop a “singularity,” even when the motion starts smoothly? Here, a singularity means the dynamics lead to speeds in the fluid growing without bound within a finite amount of time. The development of a singularity would have to happen despite the presence of viscosity, which tends to smooth out motion. Because a real fluid cannot move infinitely fast, this would mark a breakdown in how the equations model the fluid. To continue modeling the system, one would then need to track the behaviour of each particle individually.

They say that the equation can develop a singularity, which apparently means it is not a perfect model.

This proof, produced by an internal OpenAI system, shows that the dynamics of the Navier-Stokes equations for fluid motion can develop a singularity in finite time.

This is very exciting to me as I believe it to be the first scientific result of an AI model. Previous results have been basically irrelevant to the sciences. However, this result is of course still completely symbolic in nature, which is not surprising because LLMs are not embodied enough to collect data and analyze it autonomously.

While they are generating amazing PR recently, I will say GPT-6 is somewhat disappointing for coding. It is not the same leap that 5.5 to 5.6 sol was. It would appear that the models are getting better at running very long context chains while efficiency improvements and refinements in lower level tasks are lacking. Still, it's great work from OpenAI and it's plausible to me that if there's no singularity in general by 2030, there will be for mathematicians. They will no longer be meaningful for producing math, rather they will only be humans who understand it.

At this point the AI doubters should be eating a double serving of Crow. And the best thing about it all is how this is the worst AI will ever be.

In other news, OpenAI released GPT Image 2.5 today as well, representing yet another significant advance in AI generated images. I'd feel bad for the human artists etc., except the've been dead for over a year at this point and we might as well have their eventual replacement AI be as good as possible.

We thought art would be the first to go, but that’s clearly wrong. AI is bad at producing useable images. I know this won’t always be the case, but by the time an ad exec can produces ads without an art team, other professions will be long gone as well.

AI is bad at producing useable images

Ai is very good at producing useable images, especially for people that can't or don't want to afford an art team. I can have an idea and generate, say, cute comics for my kid for a few cents and a couple minutes of time; that would be prohibitively expensive and a much bigger hassle dealing with an actual artist.

That said, I would agree it is less good at producing high-quality, consistent-across-time, consistent-across-detail images, and defaults to an uncanny and chabuduo lowest common denominator style.

AI is bad at producing useable images.

Art is meh, writing style is terrible. Part of this is the lack of RLVR; the alternative just trains the model to produce the lowest common denominator, which is what we get.

But, fundamentally, I don't think the labs care about art or prose style. Writing can be slop and it'll annoy people for a couple years, while math is a load-bearing component of RSI. Get RSI, and you can catch up on writing over a long weekend.

But, fundamentally, I don't think the labs care about art or prose style.

That is probably true, but not really indicative that things will improve. The labs do care about programming, and LLMs still suck at programming. So even the thing the labs have put probably the most effort into, the machine is still below the level of a competent human.

Art is meh, writing style is terrible. Part of this is the lack of RLVR

I think these are categorically different than math: the theorem prover languages are at least a clear Boolean success criterion. "Is this painting/book good?" is canonically an opinion question without a singular answer.

From what I can tell, human-driven post-training has historically been done with English speakers hireable at low hourly rates, but probably not ones that appreciate Ulysses (I certainly haven't read it). Even if they could afford English department grad students, would they be willing to train, effectively, their replacements? How do you rank the writing styles of Faulkner versus Hemingway? It seems there is at least some room for legitimate creativity there.

Artistic style isn't just a matter of opinion, it's a matter of opinion in a specific context.

I swear the above sentence was an accident, and I only noticed what I was doing halfway through, but it'll work perfectly as a demonstration too. Aren't you sick of that "It's not X, it's Y" idiom right now? Judicious use of thesis/antithesis pairs was compelling back in the Before Times of 5 years ago, but because it was compelling RLHF seized upon it as Good Writing, and so now AI writing uses it everywhere and we're sick of it. Not that you loved Caesar less, but that you loved Rome more? Learn to write for yourself, Will, you hack!

Great art is supposed to have a timeless quality too, but a lot of good art is directly speaking to the wider artistic milieu of its time, and making choices about what styles and tropes can be used unashamedly vs what have become cliches that must be avoided or subverted. This is normally a stable system, because as something becomes briefly overused it immediately begins to repel other potential users, but if a huge swath of humanity is using the same handful of systems that are trained on the same total-corpus-of-human-art then we lose a lot of that stabilizing negative feedback, and the results we get stuck with are hard to avoid via simple instruction alone.

I think this is just a technical problem, frankly. You can prompt models to actually have decent writing style with enough effort which means it's possible that fine tuning or some even simpler operation on the output fixes the problem entirely. And that's a valuable product so i'm certain someone's going to come up with it eventually.

Slop writing and em dashes is the record skipping of our time, nothing more. People will miss it and try to ape it in 20 years.

You can prompt models to actually have decent writing style with enough effort

People keep saying this but never share the prompts. It's not possible.

Depends on your use case. They’re definitely usable for book covers and DnD games. Artists are losing work to AI, no reason to pretend otherwise. But there are still noticeable gaps.

If you spent thousands of hours writing a novel and are going to pay for an actual printing run, the least you can do is spend $200 for someone on fiverr or vgen or whatever to make a book cover.

Though I do suspect that alot of people who need art would just rather talk to a sycophantic robot than an annoying fleshy artist, and have the instant gratification of getting the results in 1 minute.

Using LLMs for artwork is a very interesting case of economic forces in action.

Turns out, it's entirely possible that alot of artists are simply pricing thier results too high and are getting bit because of it.

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