OpenAI says an internal model proved finite-time blowup for 3D Navier–Stokes, and will not claim the $1M Millennium Prize
On 2026-09-08 OpenAI published a 165-page proof plus a Lean formalization arguing the 3D incompressible Navier–Stokes equations can develop a singularity in finite time, with energy staying bounded. Sébastien Bubeck says roughly 10,000 concurrent agents ran for about 88 hours (1–5 September), exchanging near 5 million inter-agent messages and about 130 billion output tokens, with 17 more hours for formalization and a cost in the several millions of dollars. The model is internal and described as significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra; OpenAI says it will not claim the prize. For builders the number that matters is the shape of the run: a 10,000-agent swarm on one problem for 88 hours is the first public example of compute-as-proof-search at that scale.
Source
↳ Follow the thread