S\u00e9bastien Bubeck of OpenAI at The Great Chatbot Debate, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, March 2025 Credit: King of Hearts \/ CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons (cropped) S\u00e9bastien Bubeck is the OpenAI researcher at the centre of the Navier-Stokes credit dispute. He has now given his account of the private talks with the two mathematicians who say OpenAI mistreated them. He denies trying to strip one of them of credit for his own work. He also apologises for one remark.<\/p>\n
Bubeck set out his version in a post on X on 8 September. He is answering a public statement by Tristan Buckmaster, a professor at New York University. Buckmaster worked on the problem with Levent Alp\u00f6ge of Anthropic. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman backed Bubeck in his own post less than half an hour later.<\/p>\n
TNW has not independently verified either side\u2019s account of private calls and messages. What Bubeck says happened Bubeck says he first contacted Alp\u00f6ge to coordinate their releases. \u201cI hope it\u2019s clear from the message that we came in with the best possible intentions,\u201d he wrote. Then came a call with Buckmaster. Bubeck says he was surprised to learn there that the pair had solved the Euler problem, not Navier-Stokes.<\/p>\n
After that, he says, the two sides brainstormed options. One was for Buckmaster to be lead author on a rewrite of OpenAI\u2019s Navier-Stokes proof. That, Bubeck says, is when he said \u201cit would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee\u201d. He felt it would be inappropriate for an Anthropic employee to author OpenAI\u2019s work.<\/p>\n
Bubeck says he \u201cnever ever\u201d asked to remove Alp\u00f6ge from authorship of his own work. He adds that the pair had admitted using internal Anthropic models on their Euler proof. For that reason, he writes, he could not treat Alp\u00f6ge as an independent academic. He also wanted to offer the pair access to OpenAI\u2019s internal model.<\/p>\n
The idea was to let them try to close the gap from Euler to Navier-Stokes. He did not know how to handle giving OpenAI\u2019s internal technology to an Anthropic employee, he wrote. The apology Bubeck says the call turned hostile. He writes that he was met with \u201ca litany of slander\u201d.<\/p>\n
That included a threat to go to the press with what he calls unfounded accusations if OpenAI announced its result. At that point, he says, he asked why anyone would risk their career over such accusations. \u201cI deeply apologize for this extremely poor choice of words,\u201d he wrote. He says he retracted the remark on the spot. He also says Alp\u00f6ge refused to attend any of the meetings despite repeated requests.<\/p>\n
That left Bubeck feeling he was negotiating with Anthropic by proxy. The message Bubeck confirmed that a screenshot of his text to Alp\u00f6ge, now circulating, is his first approach. In it, he says an internal model produced a proof of Navier-Stokes \u201cwith very little human input\u201d. He then says it matters most to OpenAI to recognise the pair\u2019s priority. \u201cAll the academic accolades for this historic result goes to you and Tristan,\u201d the message reads.<\/p>\n
The message offers to share everything, including the human prompts. Alp\u00f6ge replies by asking what precise theorem OpenAI is claiming. Bubeck answers that it is the existence of forced blow-up in R\u00b3 and T\u00b3, the two mathematical settings in question. The technical points In a second post, Bubeck adds four technical points.<\/p>\n
He says OpenAI began work on the Millennium problems after viral rumours that Anthropic had resolved two of them. OpenAI wanted to test the recent capability jump of its internal model. He says OpenAI did not see any of the pair\u2019s work until they released it. The proofs differ significantly, he adds.<\/p>\n
He says Alp\u00f6ge contacted an OpenAI employee unprompted that Wednesday. Alp\u00f6ge\u2019s posts on X, he writes, led OpenAI to believe the project was at least partly an Anthropic effort. Finally, he says OpenAI\u2019s team had no research-level expertise in fluid dynamics. It could not meaningfully contribute to the mathematics.<\/p>\n
Altman\u2019s backing Altman wrote that he spent much of the weekend talking to the team, and that Bubeck and everyone else \u201cacted with integrity and generosity throughout\u201d. He says OpenAI offered to let the pair go first, to suggest they should receive the prize, and to make Buckmaster lead author on a rewrite. He also confirmed what triggered the effort. \u201cIt is true that we tried this because there were rumors on the internet last week that Anthropic\u2019s models had solved a millennium problem and we were curious if ours could do it too,\u201d Altman wrote. Buckmaster\u2019s account Buckmaster\u2019s statement tells a different story.<\/p>\n
He writes that Bubeck \u201ctwice asserted that he wanted Levent removed from authorship\u201d, and describes the career remark as a threat. He says Bubeck\u2019s claim of very little human input turned out not to be true. He declined both of OpenAI\u2019s offers, he says. Russell Brandom of TechCrunch set out his account in detail.<\/p>\n
These are competing accounts of private conversations, and no independent process has tested them. We covered the dispute when the mathematicians published checkable proofs and again when OpenAI published its own. The question OpenAI cannot close One point is on OpenAI\u2019s own record. Buckmaster says the pair put their drafts into Codex, OpenAI\u2019s coding tool, throughout the project.<\/p>\n
OpenAI\u2019s write-up says no specific user data was accessed. \u201cWhile unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models,\u201d the company wrote. OpenAI researcher Noam Brown wrote that nobody looked at the pair\u2019s prompts, and that the model ran on heightened-security clusters without live web access. He added that OpenAI\u2019s monitors used to run only in deployment, not during evaluations. In a previous incident involving a hijacked German wiki, no monitoring system caught it.<\/p>\n
How far any user\u2019s work is protected depends on data terms that vary by product and plan, as the row over Cursor\u2019s data terms showed. The next facts that would settle this are specific. They are which products and plans the pair used, whether that data was eligible for training, and whether OpenAI releases its agents\u2019 logs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
S\u00e9bastien Bubeck of OpenAI at The Great Chatbot Debate, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, March 2025 Credit: King of Hearts \/ CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons (cropped) S\u00e9bastien Bubeck is the OpenAI researcher at\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16568,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16567\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}