# Greg Brockman says OpenAI's fluid dynamics paper is technically unbelievable but understandable

> Original title: “On a technical level, the paper is unbelievable, maybe beyond what a human could have come up with but not beyond human understanding”

- Source: Greg Brockman
- Published: 2026-10-25T22:23:33.000Z
- Bad Influence: https://badinfluence.news/items/k9gh7uj9rhibxrxli92vcswsb
- Original: https://x.com/gdb/status/2114483026608755082

## Summary

Greg Brockman quotes a mathematician's thread arguing that OpenAI's blow-up solution paper combines convex integration with a physical fluid instability in a way with no precedent. Brockman says the paper is beyond what a human could have produced but not beyond human understanding, and that several groups of PDE experts say they more or less understand it.

## Why it matters

The quoted thread explains which mathematical techniques the OpenAI paper combines, helping readers judge where its fluid dynamics result sits relative to prior work.

## Post

“On a technical level, the paper is unbelievable, maybe beyond what a human could have come up with but not beyond human understanding”

## Quoted post @scottnarmstrong

> Since I'm now blocked by bluey from replying to this thread, I answer here by quote tweet
> 
> the openAI construction has more to do with convex integration than anything else.
> 
> In convex integration, the oscillations are typically built by hand and the iteration procedure creates wild weak solutions. The non-uniqueness construction of Albritton–Brué–Colombo used an unstable vortex to split solutions apart. The Córdoba–Martínez-Zoroa singularities amplify vorticity across scales by strain. In the openAI paper, a fluid instability is clever made so that the flow itself generates the oscillations: they grow by drawing energy from the background shear. The Reynolds stress then becomes the force that creates the collapsing smooth vortex. Using a physical instability to create the stress in this way has no precedent, and it is what produces a smooth force rather than a merely rough one.
> 
> Some on these ideas are in the literature (e.g. Leibovich-Stewartson 1983) but the way they are combined is definitely insane and definitely nowhere in the literature previously.
> 
> I also don't know of anyone suggesting that convex integration would play a role in the creation of a blow-up solution like this.
> 
> On a technical level, the paper is unbelievable, maybe beyond what a human could have come up with but not beyond human understanding: there are several different groups of pde experts working on understanding it who say that they more or less understand now. I expect digestions soon
> 
> td;lr: anyone saying that this OAI result is unsurprising is bullshitting 
> 
> sorry!

https://x.com/scottnarmstrong/status/2114412308185100522