OpenAI Cracks Navier-Stokes, Tech Trailers, AI Jobs Apocalypse on Hold | Diet TBPN

0:01John Coogan: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.

0:45John Coogan: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.

1:33John Coogan: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?

2:07John Coogan:And so lots of different back and forth. And 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. We're 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.

2:48John Coogan: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 100-meter sprint in the parking lot. while the actual Olympics is going out in the stadium. And so a lot of these are just, you know, vibe 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.

3:29John Coogan: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.

4:05John Coogan:But that's not actually what happened to this matter. One of the reasons I'm excited, I believe we agreed last week that if anyone solved Navier Stokes, Tyler would shave his head. Oh, that's right. Didn't we do that? We said something. No, no. That was about the details. Oh, that was the test. The details are kind of funny. Get ready to shave your head, buddy. But yeah, this is a big moment. Yeah, I think it was actually, if any AI progress happens at all, Tyler seems to say. Yeah. But do you have a steel man for why this matters? So I think I agree that like, I don't think the breakthrough, you know, this new stuff that's going on is like practically super useful.

4:41I don't think you're going to feel it when you're on an airplane. You're not going to feel like less turbulence now because of this. But I think these are like the most important open math problems. I think like these are more close to like, you know, a beautiful painting or something than like some like practical engineering breakthrough.

4:56John Coogan:Yeah. This is like pure math. This is the peak of the mountain of math. Same month that AI solved this incredibly difficult math problem, I saw someone use Chachapetita to book a haircut. So, in terms of the actual economy, the actual impact of these things, like practically using these tools for something that people enjoy, that's not just spinning their wheels, it's not just optimizing endless things, that's actually generative and moving things forward, not just defending against cyber attacks. Winsome says, if you get a Millennium Prize, you all have to get bowl cuts. Oh, bowl cuts. Bowl cuts are interesting.

5:38John Coogan:That's really, really ridiculous. You do get a million bucks, so there's that. That's not nothing, but in the AGI race where trillions are being deployed, it is very minimal. It sounds like cause for optimism that Navier-Stokes would improve airflow over a wing, something like that, but that's not really how it will work. Proving these equations is unlikely to actually have any measurable impact, impact. And that's sort of agreed upon. And physicists have sort of chimed in with this take that this won't actually move the discipline of engineering forward at all, but it is a cool demo. So clearly it matters for hype and vibes.

6:20John Coogan:Solving our math problems is good heuristic to show how quickly models are progressing. And to me, it just comes down to humans are able to use machines that humans built to further humanity's general knowledge. Yeah, yeah, it's good. But I feel like benchmarks, and if you're just trying to measure AI progress, benchmarks and raw inputs and raw metrics of the model sort of do the same thing. Like the number of people who will be convinced that AI is progressing exponentially because they see this result. And then you look at the number of people that would be equally convinced of AI progress just by hearing, oh, there's 10 gigawatts coming online.

7:00John Coogan:Or the new model has 10 trillion parameters. Or it was trained with a billion dollars of computers, something like that. But your thing is the average person is probably more impressed by Sora than by this. Yes, totally, totally. It's way more visceral to actually see something. And that's why The Weeknd was very much Blender and people showing 3D renders and remodeling their houses and building small games and web games. And that feels much more like a, okay, breakthrough. People are having fun. They're vibe coding stuff. But they're also doing 3D modeling, which is like a new skill. We've had image generation, video generation, but there's something much more, I don't know, like grounded in watching a, from just a few images, watching a Blender model come to life.

7:46John Coogan:You can walk around inside of it and it can be something that you know the model doesn't exist. I saw a few demos that were like a train and it was like, oh wow, I modeled this amazing train. But there are perfectly modeled trains out there that you can just go grab from the internet. That's not that impressive when you actually see your specific house or your car or something that doesn't already exist out there perfectly modeled. You're like, wow. Sorry to interrupt. John Anderson says, why are we only seeing the calendar days for Road to Christmas? Can we please get a weekdays and workdays breakdown for diehard?

8:20Yeah, we need a full screen graphic. So let's work on that. Thank you. Thank you, John. Good comment.

8:26John Coogan:Yeah. So in terms of field, the AGI, computer use, definitely one of these. Astra, particularly faster at computer use for like really, really mundane things. Also just interesting to just have a very different interface to your computer, like configurations, all the things we use to have to dig through a bunch of settings, maybe set something on the command line, maybe find a control panel. You can just ask Codex or any AI agent to go and do it and it'll just do it and come back to you. One of the use cases that I'm excited about is getting, you know, when you get a parking ticket and then you're like, I got this parking ticket.

9:03I want to deal with it. And it's like, well, the ticket is not in the portal yet. Sure. Being able to go into the chat and say, hey, once this ticket is live in the system, please pay it. Parking super intelligence. And so you can just forget about it. Yeah. Parking ticket super intelligence.

9:19John Coogan:It is. It feels like we're close. So, yeah, I think that the Millennium Prizes will get solved or proved or delivered probably this year, if not like this week. It feels like all of the different labs are like, put a million dollars of inference on this. Put a million dollars of inference on this. It's going to be a back and forth, and the labs are going to very quickly solve basically all of these problems. And then there will be a search for new problems. But the conversation will move back to curing cancer, almost certainly. because that's the one that's so grounded. That's the one that's, you know, supposed to be tractable.

9:56John Coogan:It's been messaged from various labs for so long that people will want that, but there will be a longer flywheel from actually designing a cure for a specific cancer, running tests, seeing that it was effective. You can't do it with a million dollars of inference over a weekend, I think. But my prediction is, like, the conversation will go back to biotech after we basically solve math, which is a crazy thing to say, but it feels like we're there. What do you think? Yeah, all the conversation. Yeah, people say it loudly is the stop. Yeah, so one, the pharmaceutical industry has been curing forms of cancer or making progress against various forms of cancer for a very long time.

10:42Get zero credit. Yeah, zero credit. Worst rep. of any category of businesses on the planet.

10:49John Coogan:Yeah. And so I don't think that that's like this, like, you know, I don't think that's a solution to sentiment around the technology industry. Yeah, I know. And I think setting up this idea, like imagine how underwhelming it will be if any AI lab comes out and makes like 20 % progress towards one specific type of cancer. Right. That's not going to come across as like, oh, wow, cured cancer. It's like, OK, they sort of advance understanding and maybe the treatment process. And this type of thing is happening all the time. Anybody who's had a family member that's suffered from cancer has heard about, hey, there's this thing in trials that's showing promising results, trying to get you into it or whatever.

11:37So that's happening all the time. Right. And it's not going to suddenly change how people feel about the technology industry broadly.

11:43John Coogan:No, it'll diffuse slowly and people will be back in like, what have you done for me lately? I don't know. It's going to be back and forth forever. But anyway, in the meantime, somebody gave Astra a paintbrush, a robot, and a camera and asked it to paint the Golden Gate Bridge in real life. It figured out how to control the robot and progressively got better throughout its attempts. The time lapse is sick. Here's a one-minute time lapse of his account painting the Golden Gate Bridge. How would you rate this, Jordy? It appears better than I could do. Better than you could do? How long are you giving yourself?

12:27I'm saying at least by the later attempts.

12:30John Coogan:Okay, the later attempts because it gets better. The first one was not quite there in my opinion. Still pretty impressive. Yeah, somebody was talking about potential for a 3D printer boom with all the 3D modeling, the idea that you can design. I saw someone else designed a system where you can, from a prompt, go from prompt to Lego kit basically in one go. So it takes your prompt, whatever you gave it. Like, look at this, John. That's solid. That's pretty solid. I think you could do better with enough time. I don't know how long that took, but it is impressive. It's a fun demo. And again, it lives in the real world.

13:10John Coogan:It's not abstract at all. So you can just watch it work, watch it do the thing. One of the best reactions to Astra's release last week was Josh, who's over at Century. His company was acquired by Century. He said, after Astra's release yesterday, scoring 99 % on ARK AGI 3, I think it's become clear that AGI is no longer some distant hypothetical. about 15 minutes after the benchmarks came out, I booked the first flight I could find to Jackson Hole. And he goes on to say he's also looking into purchasing a horse. At this point, horses remain one of the only major transportation platforms with no API, no OTA updates, and no realistic path to MCP support.

13:52So glad to see more people getting into the horse game. Another good demo from some where's the Astra. He says, Astra and I are working on making my contact form as difficult as possible. You actually have to fight a boss battle in order to contact them.

14:11John Coogan:That's amazing. This looks like a – I might try and contact somewhere. I'll see you after this. This is pretty fun. Yeah, the defeat of all of the CAPTCHAs is somewhat linked to the instinct news. Did you see that this weekend, Jordy? Oh, yeah, the resi bans. Yeah, so Instinct is a personal assistant AI focused on consumer. You link it with your email, your text messages. And we've seen a lot of investors sharing posts about how they're using. For what it's worth, I would be surprised if anyone in the audience hasn't already heard of Instinct. Yeah, and we talked about it before. Thank you for reintroducing it.

14:51John Coogan:But I think it's worth explaining how it works because it does seem like it triggered some bans. There was one report of an individual who got banned from Resi because they were absolutely spamming to get reservations to restaurants. And there was another example of somebody who was at the U.S. Open, was on the fan cam and then wanted footage. Oh, that was really cool. And the user experience would have been absolutely incredible, right? You're sitting there and you're like, hey, I appeared on the screen for a moment. Can you go and find this? I've had that idea so many times. Like, oh, go find someone on the fan cam.

15:28But I think what Instinct was doing in the background was being absolutely relentless. And it seems like it was reaching out to hundreds of people aggressively following up.

15:39John Coogan:Like emailing the media contact. But they did wind up getting the video. Yeah, it worked. And it was mutually beneficial. And you can imagine if the other side has agent intermediation and filtering and can process things that are spam-like but there's actually a reasonable action to take, that could make it through a filter and not actually annoy anyone on the other side. So that was a very, that was probably a glimpse into the future and like a cause for optimism. I could see, I could see that being popular, but people are doing all sorts of stuff. The classic example is like, go save money and get refunds, do that sort of stuff.

16:12John Coogan:But people are having fun with that. So many demos, this 3D website that pulls apart the male anatomy into 200, 2 ,234 model pieces. I shared this with a friend who was trying to explain in one video what to get their wheels turning. I think this is a good example. I wonder how much of this was individually modeled versus pulled from an existing model and then just animated. But it certainly works well. It's trailer time. Okay, it's trailer time. We've got two trailers that hit the timeline. Let's start with Nathan Fielder and his new film featuring none other than Elizabeth Holmes. Elizabeth Holmes.

16:52John Coogan:filmed before she went to prison. I can promise you that. May 24 is going to tear. I don't have anything to deceive you on. Of course I'm not deceiving you. I'm engaging with you as a human being.

17:07Why would I deceive you? There's no... There's no reason for me to do that.

17:17John Coogan:Okay. The acting is so good. Okay, good shot.

17:35John Coogan:How long is this... You being real right now? Always being real.

17:52John Coogan:The team is stoked. Looks beautiful. Saw a post. Somebody's saying it feels like I'm living in a simulation because this media product is like perfectly with it. You would think that a movie like this wouldn't get made by, I don't know, A24 specifically because it feels like the TAM is just like 20 ,000 people. The Theranos story was really big. Yeah. She was on the cover of Time Magazine, I believe, and cover of major magazines. It was all over the news when it happened. No, it's a lot bigger than you would. The John Carreyrou book is just a fascinating read. It's a real page turner. And so I think a lot of people read the book.

18:32John Coogan:The adaptation of the actual play-by-play story, not the documentary, but the, what do they call it, biopic, I guess. That, I think, did not break through in the same way. But it certainly, like, continued to elevate her persona. And then the posting has been, like, kept irrelevant. Yeah, there was some speculation that maybe it was Nathan that got access to the account. Completely disagree with that. I do not think that's it at all. I think that would violate some tenet of what it means to do a documentary. I mean, Nathan blurs lines all the time in terms of how he interacts with his subjects.

19:10John Coogan:So it's certainly possible, but I just don't think that's reasonable at all. How much do we know outside of the trailer, though? her like we don't know well this was leaked uh something like a year ago from a journalist who got the story and it was widely denied that it was happening and uh he was very upset that he wasn't getting enough credit for being correct here he ultimately was but yeah all we know is that they filmed the documentary in the lead-up to her actually going to prison after sentencing there was a pretty large gap between before when she had to report to the prison she gets out in 2030 so coming up three years four years away and so uh i believe even in a week you can get a lot of footage if you're spending the full you know every day with someone and then there were a number of visits to the facility by nathan that were recorded probably talking through glass or talking at a table something like that so uh we don't know what i'm thinking what sbf nathan fielder sequel to this one yeah this just becomes like a the problem is that he's already in jail so the question is just what else does nathan for nathan fielder have in the can who knows there there's a rumor that he's secretly running a boy band right now there's this rumor that that there's a boy band that's popular on tiktok this is real that's popular on tiktok that's entirely invented by him.

20:40John Coogan:Boythrob. Boythrob. Yeah. Are you familiar with this? Really? I thought you were going to say he's Nathan Fielder's SD kid. Stay with us in the trailer zone. Our trailer dropped just this morning.

21:01What is the image of the future that you see? Wait, pause. Was that a Valkyrie? Yeah. Okay. Continue.