were surprised to discover that (a) Anthropic had not done it at all
They were surprised another competitor had not wastefully thrown $20 million+ worth of compute at a problem they had no business solving in the first place?
Why is it wasteful to solve one of the most famous problems in modern mathematics? And why would one particular company have no business solving it in the first place?
I guess by their own account they were doing competitive analysis on the product and incidentally solved NS. Probably the two companies should agree to benchmark on random diophantine systems, which are harder and more applicable anyway. It wasn't "brute force" but they did spend $10-20M over the course of a few days based on a rumor, which is ... something. The fact they're not actually taking credit, and published no insights other than "it's a vortex" shows the company really has no business in mathematics. They're not interested (the guy said as much) and it obviously won't pay the bill - rather, they were able to pre-empt an announcement they thought Anthropic may have been preparing to make.
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They were surprised another competitor had not wastefully thrown $20 million+ worth of compute at a problem they had no business solving in the first place?
That's reaching, imho.
Why is it wasteful to solve one of the most famous problems in modern mathematics? And why would one particular company have no business solving it in the first place?
I guess by their own account they were doing competitive analysis on the product and incidentally solved NS. Probably the two companies should agree to benchmark on random diophantine systems, which are harder and more applicable anyway. It wasn't "brute force" but they did spend $10-20M over the course of a few days based on a rumor, which is ... something. The fact they're not actually taking credit, and published no insights other than "it's a vortex" shows the company really has no business in mathematics. They're not interested (the guy said as much) and it obviously won't pay the bill - rather, they were able to pre-empt an announcement they thought Anthropic may have been preparing to make.
They brute forced it, that proves they had no business solving it.
They didn't know what they were doing and they pumped a bunch more carbon into our atmosphere because hubris basically.
Shame on them.
Every sentence in this comment is incorrect
This article proves otherwise https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/8/on-navier-stokes/
Why shouldn't they advance math research and test the limits of their models?