ChatGPT proves that universities are collections of second-rate humans (Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness)

One of my theories for why colleges are facing price resistance (example) is that colleges and universities are now, by definition, collections of second-rate humans. The first-rate humans have all been hired by Nvidia or the AI companies. That’s obviously true in engineering and computer nerdism, but the AI companies also want to do great things in medicine, law, literature, art, etc. It is difficult to think of a truly effective human in any academic field who couldn’t be useful at OpenAI or Anthropic and, therefore, since these companies have infinite money and infinite impact, they should be able to hire away anyone that they think they need. Maybe it makes sense to pay between $0 and $6,440/year in tuition for University of Florida (Go Gators!), but how can it make sense to spend $70,000+/year on tuition at a lower-ranked private university, e.g., University of Rochester?

Where are America’s first-rate mathematicians now working? “OpenAI Says It Has Cracked One of Math’s ‘Millennium Problems’” (New York Times) gives us a hint:

OpenAI said on Tuesday that its newest artificial intelligence technology had solved one of the “Millennium Problems,” a collection of important unanswered math questions meant to push the world’s leading mathematicians to new heights.

The company announced that one of its latest models, which has not yet been released to the public, needed just 88 hours to solve what mathematicians call “the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem.” This problem involves a series of equations that are often used to predict the weather.

The equations describe the movement of water and other fluids. The Navier-Stokes problem, which has no clear practical value, asks whether these equations completely break down in certain situations. OpenAI’s proof claims to have defined just such a situation.

This would imply, at least theoretically, that the laws of physics themselves would break down under certain conditions: that, for example, water could be made to spontaneously explode. But mathematicians and physicists do not believe that this mathematical breakdown could really lead to such an outcome in the physical world.

What does OpenAI get besides bragging rights?

The Navier-Stokes problem was one of seven “Millennium Problems” selected by the Clay Mathematics Institute in the year 2000 as a way of tracking the progress of mathematics in the new millennium. The institute, founded by an American businessman named Landon T. Clay, offered a million dollars for the first correct solution to each problem. Before OpenAI’s announcement, only one of the problems had been solved.

Dr. Evil would be happy (below), but isn’t $1 million what a receptionist hired in 2023 at OpenAI earns every month now as his/her/zir/their stock vests?

Aside from no taxpayers having been injured in order to fund this, the beauty of the biggest news in mathematics in 23 years (since Grigori Perelman’s proof of the Poincaré conjecture in 2002–03?) is that it has absolutely no practical implication. Solving the Navier-Stokes equations hasn’t gotten faster or easier because of these AI/math nerds. The bizarre situation where the equations can’t be used (what ChatGPT proved existed) doesn’t exist in our universe.

Perhaps someone in what’s left of Hollywood could make money off this, nonetheless… how about a movie called “Navier-Stokes” in which a diverse crew of NASA astronauts go through a worm hole into a parallel universe where Navier–Stokes singularities arise naturally in ordinary fluids and don’t have to be forced with 88 hours of GPU crunching? Aliens are discovered who get around by exploiting vortices produced by these singularities. Air turns into plasma without any warning. An enormous sea monster threatens our heroes, but then a massive whirlpool suddenly forms for no reason in the alien sea and the monster is dragged into the abyss. The astronauts themselves are safe within their ship, though, because it turns out that the life-size hollow titanium bust of George Floyd that President AOC mandated be included just outside the ship’s Islamic prayer room resonates to break up singularities that are forming within the cabin air. The crew also discover that they can be safe on the alien planet surface if they travel together like a Christian saint procession, with the Bust of Floyd held in front of them.