Math Wars, GG Navier Stokes, Greg Brockman Joins | Dan Wright, Eric Seufert, Scott Wu, Sahir Jaggi, Andrew Borovsky, Harry Mellsop

**Jordi Hays** (0:00)
You're watching TBPN.

**John Coogan** (0:02)
Today is Monday, September 8th, 2026 We are live from the TBPN Ultra Down, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capitol.

**Jordi Hays** (0:12)
You know what time it is, John.

**John Coogan** (0:14)
rip.com time. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards. Go pay. Accounting and a whole lot more all in one place.

**Jordi Hays** (0:23)
I need my countdown. I need my countdown.

**Scott Wu** (0:27)
Doing some math. There it is.

**Jordi Hays** (0:29)
Road to Christmas, 107 days.

**John Coogan** (0:31)
December 25th minus today.

**Jordi Hays** (0:34)
It's flying by.

**John Coogan** (0:35)
Made only possible with math. 107 days. Time is flying till Christmas.
Road to Christmas is going strong.

**Jordi Hays** (0:42)
Start scoping out Christmas trees.

**John Coogan** (0:45)
Yep. Now's the time.

**Jordi Hays** (0:46)
Once we get under 100

**John Coogan** (0:47)
Hopefully, you've already planned it.

**Jordi Hays** (0:48)
Open season.

**John Coogan** (0:49)
Open season.
Does math matter? That's the big question. I was debating this with Tyler today.
Lots of tension on the timeline over Navier Stokes, the Millennium Prize math problem. There has been a Millennium Prize math problem that was solved before the Poincare Conjecture in the pre-AI era. These are very, very difficult math problems that all PhD, mathematicians, all sorts of elite, the upper echelon of math has been grappling with for years, and AI is starting to knock these down. Remember, last year was the year of the IMO gold medals from both Google DeepMind and OpenAI. We talked to Scott Wu about this, who's coming on the show later today, huge raise for Cognition, and Scott made the prediction on TBPN early in 2025 that he believed that artificial intelligence would be able to achieve gold at the IMO, the International Math Olympiad, in 2025, and he was right. He nailed it. Progress continued, but debate remained around cool calculator, bro, basically, is the critique. I mean, people just, they don't feel empowered by a system that's really good at math. They just, people, already a TI-83 can do more complex math than most people can do, and so when you say, oh, there's another level of math that you don't know about and you don't care about and computers are good at it, a lot of people, their eyes glaze over, and so the bigger question here for me is all about the public perception. What actually matters here? I think they're cool benchmarks. I think they're interesting stories. Obviously, there's a lot of drama over this race. It feels like it was neck and neck. Now, there's a bunch of debates going back and forth with a mathematician who works at Google and a mathematician who's independent, who worked alongside an anthropic researcher who are both working on it, and they were apparently texting back and forth and going back and forth on, did they steal the data? Did they copy each other's? Do they have different approaches? So lots of different back and forth. I think someone summed it up well by saying that these math models have discovered the hardest problem of advanced mathematics, which is authorship contribution. Who actually did the work? Who gets lead left on the paper?
But yeah, there was a drama last year, 2025, during the IMO.
OpenAI and Google DeepMind, and I believe Harmonic, the math AI lab that we had on the show last week, were all working on solving the International Math Olympiad. Remember, there's six questions. Question six, no AI model could solve. It was more complex. But both teams got a 35 out of 42 Even though they only got five questions out of six right, that's good enough for gold. It's the bare minimum, but they did it. But there was a bunch of back and forth because OpenAI validated with former IMO gold medalists, while Google's result was graded by the official rubric that year, which is internal to the organization. We called it at the time, it's like they ran the fastest hundred meter sprint in the parking lot while the actual Olympics is going on in the stadium. And so, a lot of these are just, you know, by wars, races, who does what, does it even matter?
The interesting thing about Navier Stokes is, does it matter, Tyler? You think it does? I'll debate you on this a little bit. It seems like it doesn't because the equations themselves are known. They're just not fully proven. Engineers and physicists already solve them numerically all the time for a particular situation. So, airflow around a wing, you might have to use some of these equations, weather models, water through a pipe. These are critical things. They are boring, but you can imagine that there would be cause for optimism. You know, better weather models save lives during hurricane season. Increased airflow across an airplane wing, that could lead to more efficiency, longer ranges, cheaper flights, lower carbon emissions. There's a bunch of reasons why you could solve all that and be excited. But that's not actually what happens.