It took OpenAI's agents 130 billion tokens to crack a 90-year-old math problem

OpenAI announced on Tuesday that its AI agents solved the Navier-Stokes equations, a 90-year-old math problem, using about 10,000 concurrent agents that sent 2.7 million messages over 88 hours, with verification taking another 17 hours. LisanBench estimated the output tokens alone would cost about $6.5 million at consumer prices, with total costs possibly reaching $10 million to $40 million. The achievement drew criticism from mathematicians Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge over data usage, which OpenAI denied but said it 'cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.'

Math is hard. And, apparently, expensive. On Tuesday, OpenAI said its agents had solved the Navier-Stokes equations https://www.businessinsider.com/navier-stokes-millennium-prize-problems-2014-10 , a 90-year-old set of mathematical formulas that can predict how liquids and gases move. It's so complicated that the Clay Mathematics Institute has offered a $1 million prize https://www.businessinsider.com/millennium-prize-problems-million-dollar-prize-2017-12 to any mathematician who finds the solution. OpenAI said that finding the solution required a lot of resources. Its coordinating AI agents sent 2.7 million messages while working on the proof. The effort involved about 10,000 concurrent agents and reached a resolution after 88 hours. Verification took another 17 hours. Such intensive use of AI doesn't come cheap. In a post on X, LisanBench, an LLM benchmark evaluator, estimated that the output tokens alone would cost about $6.5 million at OpenAI's average consumer price. Including the far larger volume of input tokens, the post estimated the total could reach $10 million to $40 million. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman replied, joking that AI was a bubble. OpenAI's announcement that it solved the age-old mathematics problem https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-navier-stokes-math-breakthrough-drama-2026-9 was celebrated within the AI industry. It's also been widely criticized after two mathematicians — Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge — raised questions about how OpenAI used their related research data to train its models. OpenAI denied direct access to their work, but said that it "cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models." The company didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.