NYU Professor Accuses OpenAI of Copying Work and Says AI Makes Math Publishing Race Pointless

Buckmaster had been working with Levent Alpöge, a Long Island-raised math prodigy and researcher at OpenAI rival Anthropic, on a different elusive fluid dynamics equation known as the Euler problem. He found a solution using AI tools from both Anthropic and ChatGPT. Buckmaster said scientists from OpenAI approached him and tried to convince him to jointly announce the solution, claiming they had independently solved Navier-Stokes. Building on work by mathematicians Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa, the pair found a solution to the Euler problem, a stepping stone to Navier-Stokes.

In a blog post, Buckmaster questioned the timing of OpenAI's finding. He noted that OpenAI had only done so "in the past few days," after the company became aware of his work. He asked OpenAI experts whether its AI systems used to solve the equation had been "trained on, or had access to" his research, but said they declined to answer. That prompted him to wonder how they had advanced toward the solution so quickly. The puzzle is "not the direction one arrives at in a few days," Buckmaster wrote.

OpenAI published a post on its website sharing the Navier-Stokes proof, which it credited to Astra, the company's latest AI bot. The firm insisted that no user data was incorporated into its model to solve the problem. It also noted that it "cannot rule out" that anonymized data was used to "improve our models." In the announcement, OpenAI said, "We congratulate Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster on their remarkable mathematical work." Buckmaster shot back, "Is it ethical to use customer's data to try to scoop their customer?"

Alpöge's affiliation with Anthropic "seems to have been a sore point for OpenAI," TechCrunch wrote. Buckmaster's public statement said OpenAI's Sebastien "twice asserted that he wanted Levent removed from authorship" and also said that "it was so annoying that Levent works at Anthropic." Buckmaster said he still refused to remove the Anthropic mathematician's credit. He said he told OpenAI that if it released its result in the way proposed, he would go public with what happened. The reply, according to Buckmaster, was, "Why would you ruin your career?" OpenAI's Bubeck said later on X that he had meant unfounded accusations could damage Buckmaster's career. Buckmaster said he replied that he is an academic and asked why going public would ruin his career; the reply was, "If you don't want me to be nice, then I don't have to be nice."

Buckmaster later told Australia's public broadcaster ABC that the companies building AI "have zero respect for the scientific community. I mean, it's appalling, honestly." He also said AI has made the race to publish mathematical breakthroughs pointless. "I think it's pointless. Like, I think the game is up," he said. Buckmaster said he and Alpöge had more research they could publish but questioned the point of racing ahead with it when AI could perform work that had previously occupied researchers for years. He said there needed to be a discussion about how mathematics should operate in the new environment.

Buckmaster said some mathematicians had stopped publicly sharing what they were working on to avoid tipping off AI companies about their plans. He called on academics and people from OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind to discuss ground rules for how they worked together. He said the companies' power carried responsibilities that went beyond competing to solve problems before their rivals. Buckmaster also said he spent weeks checking and improving the "slop" proofs generated by AI. For now, he said he wanted to finish existing work and support his PhD students and postdoctoral researchers rather than chase another Millennium Prize. "I think it's more important to re-evaluate what math is," he said. The New York University professor also warned Australia about the centralisation of resources into the hands of a small number of privately owned foreign companies.