Friedberg: OpenAI's math solution equaled tens of thousands of human work years
David Friedberg · AI Kills Everybody or Doomer Psyop? OpenAI’s Math Breakthrough, Nike’s $200B Collapse · Sep 12, 2026 · at 1:00:01
David Friedberg discusses reports that OpenAI deployed 10,000 communicating agents and 130 billion tokens to solve a Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics problem.
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“What happened was the AI just did a bunch of brute force work to come up with this answer. And the work was done across many, many computers. 10,000 agents just means 10,000 applications running on a computer, talking back and forth to one another, sharing information, sharing Analysis. And the equivalent, if you were to think about human work years, is somewhere between 5500 thousand years of human work, with humans typing at 40 words a minute, you know, having mathematical problems, solving them with calculators, doing this sort of stuff back and forth. And you could probably reduce that down by calling it an order of magnitude, but it's still in the order of tens of thousands of years of human knowledge labor.”
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