I spent much of the weekend talking with the team who did this work. Seb--and everyone else--acted with integrity and generosity throughout. Initially we believed the other team had also solved the problem. We wanted to collaborate and do a joint release. When we learned that they had Euler but not Navier-Stokes, we offered to let them go first, to suggest that they should be the ones to get the prize, and optionally for Tristan to be the lead author on a rewrite of the OpenAI proof. We felt it was challenging to offer the same to Levent (an Anthropic employee), who was not willing to talk or coordinate with us anyway. We were open to other solutions. We would have greatly preferred coordination. We did not rush to publish even though the other team wasn't communicating with us. The team threatened us with unfounded accusations of plagarism. Now that we can see their work, the approaches appear to be different. It is also worth noting that our latest model can solve many, many other math problems. It is true that we tried this because there were rumors on the internet last week that Anthropic's models had solved a millennium problem and we were curious if ours could do it too.
I would like to clarify a few things:
- The screenshot is my reaching out to Levent to coordinate our releases. I hope it’s clear from the message that we came in with the best possible intentions.
- I never ever asked for Levent to be removed from authorship of his own work