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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8030 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.

I predict with strong confidence that within the next year, Steam will see an order of magnitude increase in the number of games released.

This is going to shift the pendulum back towards "trusted" "publishers" and stuff, where there is some sort of quality gate. Most of this flood of games is going to be games that nobody wants to play.

This is going to shift the pendulum back towards "trusted" "publishers" and stuff, where there is some sort of quality gate. Most of this flood of games is going to be games that nobody wants to play.

This implies that the publishers themselves are trusted and that the trust people place in them is being maintained. That is not the market I observe from the inside. AAA gaming seems like a dumpster fire at the moment, having arrived at a place similar to the film industry where they're actively generating anti-fandoms collectively rooting for their failure, but without the film industry's institutional moat and diversification to protect them from the consequences. There have been a lot of bombs lately, and studios, even major studios, often don't survive them. Major publishers are frequently loathed by the player-base. The studios and publishers with considerable good will are generally in the indie space or increasingly lonely titans like Rockstar, which is so lonely because those titans can and do die: Blizzard and Bungie, two of the most successful companies the space has ever seen, are arguably toast at this point. Most AAA studios appear incapable of controlling costs to anything resembling a reasonable level, so one bomb kills most of them and a second bomb kills most of the rest. Further, both workers and leadership are, from my perspective, pathologically averse to solutions to any of these problems. They'd rather unionize, blame the audience, virtue signal ideology, retreat into a bubble of toxic positivity, anything other than engage with the fact that their whole segment of the industry is a horror show at the moment.

It seems to me that the success stories follow a pattern: keeping costs low, teams small, find an audience and engage with them heavily, make the game they want as simply and quickly and responsively as possible. Alternatively, make something simple and coherent with a very small team and hope to get lucky, offsetting the risk of the gamble with pure passion. I think this latter class is already pretty large and is just going to keep growing as barriers to entry vanish. I think they're going to saturate the market, and that's going to have cascading effects on the far more leveraged-up end of the industry. Quality will rise to the top, and at some point there's so much of it that the audience dilutes and fragments, and the old business patterns become unsustainable.

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