Because the core of the issue is that it may well not have solved it, but instead plagiarised the significant step of the result from other researchers

That's why nobody's talking about how impressive this is, because its not nearly as impressive of a piece of work to simply cobble together other peoples' work that didn't know you were doing it. I could have republished relativity from einstein's notes, but people would correctly not be impressed with my ability

Until the plagiarism scandal is sorted out, its not a meaningful result at all, because nobody knows how much genuine innovation these models are displaying

Turning a bunch of vague research directions and exploratory prompts into a formalized proof is quite impressive on its own. OpenAI would have no incentive to taint its first math announcement of this magnitude if it knew it were "plagiarizing" another person's work.

People are grasping at straws it seems to dismiss the power of this new model they may have. Hate OpenAI for any reason you want, but denying the capabilities of models has been a losing game for the past 5 years.

> Because the core of the issue is that it may well not have solved it, but instead plagiarised the significant step of the result from other researchers

It's also true however that I haven't seen a single write up trying to discern what did more of the work in those AI chats - the prompts or the responses - bubble to the surface, also since we don't have access to them.

For example, if I prompt Codex with "Make me a website about strawberry cake" and nothing else, and OpenAI announces they have the best strawberry cake minutes before I launch, I'm not sure they plagiarized anything.

We just don't know if this is quibbling over "who prompted first" or if the researchers came up with anything strikingly original by themselves.

It is very unlikely to be plagiarized, and claims of plagiarism are largely unfounded and show a lack of understanding of the situation. They fall apart when reviewing the timeline, and what was actually solved.

This is the timeline:

On June 29, Buckmaster opted out of model training, and stopped allowing his chats to be used as training data with OpenAI https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/11723341370570119...

On August 15, Buckmaster and Alpöge found their blow-up for 3D incompressible Euler with forcing https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf

In late August, OpenAI completed a pretrain of its latest internal model. A model derived from this pretrain, built after August 28, found a solution to 3D incompressible Euler without forcing and Navier-Stokes with forcing. https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

To explain who solved what (I copied from here: https://x.com/IlinVasily29521/status/2097554700321329393 )

  Tristan + Levent: 3D incompressible Euler with forcing
  OpenAI: 3D incompressible Euler without forcing
  OpenAI: Navier-Stokes with forcing
  No one: Navier-Stokes without forcing

Tristan+Levent ticked the weakest case, OpenAI ticked the two next weakest, then the final case is unsolved. Only the last two are eligible for the Millennium Prize. The Navier-Stokes general case remains unsolved.

Buckmaster disabled model training long before the August 15 breakthrough results, so these chats were not used as training data for OpenAI's model which solved Navier-Stokes.

Additionally, Tristan and Levent only solved the easiest version of the problem and did not have the key insights to solve the harder versions of the problem required for the Millennium Prize.

And OpenAI directly addressed these plagiarism claims, and called them impossible: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/science/tristan-buckmaste...

"We can say categorically that it is impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training."