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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7822 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.

except the've been dead for over a year at this point

What does “dead” mean? Lots of artists still employed at video game and animation studios, lots of artists still taking commissions on patreon and the like, etc.

I’m not trying to be snarky here, but as the claims start getting more insistent and extravagant — “AGI is here”, “AGI has actually been here for a while already”, “X profession is dead” — it’s only fair that those claims start being supported with significant real world impact.

What does “dead” mean? Lots of artists still employed at video game and animation studios, lots of artists still taking commissions on patreon and the like, etc.

Re: video games, I think you're probably going to see a mass die-off in the next year or two. I predict with strong confidence that within the next year, Steam will see an order of magnitude increase in the number of games released. I would be very surprised if the current industry business model survives the flood.

Making predictions is always scary, as it should be, but if I'm wrong on this one by all means quote back at me. I'm currently running AI five or six hours a night, trying to make hay while the sun shines; we'll see how it goes.

!RemindMe one year.

I don’t think the number of new games released on Steam is going to increase that much, because even saying “ChatGPT, whip me up a sick new game” is already too much effort for most people. Think about how easy and accessible it is to write a short story (even without AI!), and then think about how few people ever do.

There is no reserve army of dormant creatives waiting for their potential to be unlocked by new advances in tooling. Most people who are ever going to publish anything are already doing it. (Admittedly, automated content farms make this more complicated and might skew the statistics.)

There is no reserve army of dormant creatives waiting for their potential to be unlocked by new advances in tooling.

I'm making a game with AI and it's honestly terrifying how many (mostly crap and with 1-5 reviews) AI games are being released on Steam. Pick a tag like puzzle and scroll down to 'sort by recent'. About 15 puzzle games were released on the 9th of September. 9 adventure RPG games on the 8th of September. Grand Strategy/4X games are rarer, maybe 1-2 games a day but heavily AI.

Sometimes you can tell from the AI image in the store page, sometimes it's the diction...

I think there was a phase change in the overall statistics too, you can see it in 2024-2025: https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/

'Limited games' means 'the shit ones nobody's going to play and don't count for achievements/collections'. They were already on an uptrend but that suddenly curved upwards. The number of actually popular games released per year remains static.

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