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

Does math matter? That's the big question. I was debating this with Tyler today. Lots of lots of 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 Poincaré 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 were 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? 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, were all working on solving the International Math Olympiad. Remember, there's 6 questions. Question 6, no AI model could solve. It was more complex. But both teams got a 35 out of 42. 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 while the actual Olympics is going on 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. They're 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 a 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—

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—

Oh, that was the task force. Details are coming.

Get ready to shave your head, buddy. But yeah, this is a big moment.

Yeah, I think it was actually more— it was if any— any AI progress happens at all, Tyler shaved his head.

Yeah, yeah.

But do you have a steelman for why this matters?

So, I think I agree that, like, I don't think that the breakthrough, you know, this new stuff that's going on is, like, practically super useful. I don't think you're gonna feel it when you're on an airplane. You're not gonna 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 some practical engineering breakthrough.

Yeah.

This is 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 ChatGPT to book a haircut. So equivalent— no, I mean, in terms of the actual economy, the actual impact of these things, practically using these tools for something that people enjoy, that's not just spinning their wheels, it's not just optimizing and things that's actually generative and moving things forward, not just defending against cyberattacks, doing something interesting.

Winsome says if he gets a Millennium Prize, you all have to get bowl cuts.

Oh, bowl cuts.

Bowl cuts are interesting.

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 something like that, but that's not really how it will work. Proving these equations is unlikely to actually have any measurable 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. Solving hard math problems is a good heuristic to show how quickly models are progressing, but—

Yeah, 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 are that would be equally convinced of AI progress just by hearing, oh, there's 10 gigawatts coming online, or the new model has 10 trillion parameters, or it was trained with $1 billion of compute or something like that.

What you're saying 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 weekend 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. 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 Die Hard? Yeah, we need a full-screen graphic. So let's work on that. Thank you. Thank you, John.

Good comment. Yeah, so, uh, in terms of field AGI, computer use, definitely one of these. Uh, 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 used to have to dig through, 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, I want to deal with it. And then it's like, well, the ticket is not in the portal yet. Being able to go into chat and say, hey, once this ticket is live in the system, please pay it. And so you can just forget about it. Parking ticket superintelligence.

It is.

It feels like we're close.

So yeah, I think that the Millennium Prize will get solved or proved or delivered probably this year, if not this week. It feels like all of the different labs are like, put $1 million of inference on this. Put $1 million 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'll 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 supposed to be tractable. 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 $1 million of inference over a weekend, I think. But my prediction is 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 lab leads will just 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 now.

Good zero print.

Yeah, zero credit, worst reputation of any category of businesses on the planet.

Yeah.

And so I don't think that that's like this, like, you know, I don't think that's the 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— One type of cancer. Type of cancer, right? That's not gonna come across as like, oh wow, they cured cancer. It's like, okay, they sort of advanced 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. So that's happening all the time, right? And it's not gonna suddenly change how people feel about the technology industry broadly.

No, it'll diffuse slowly and people will be back in like the, 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 1-minute time-lapse of— I don't know how to pronounce this, but his account painting the Golden Gate Bridge. How would you rate this, Jordi?

It appears better than I could do.

Better than you could do? How long are you giving yourself?

I'm saying at least by the later attempts.

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 could, 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 looks pretty 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. 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 Sentry. His company was acquired by Sentry. He said after Astra's release yesterday, scoring 99% on Arc 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. So glad to see more people Getting into horses. Getting into the horse game. Another good demo from Somewherezy. 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.

That's amazing. This looks like a— I might try and contact Somewherezy 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, Jordi?

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 what it's— how they're using.

For what it's worth, I'd be surprised if anyone in the audience hasn't already. Heard of Instant.

Yeah.

And we talked about it before.

Thank you for— thank you for reintroducing.

But, but I, but I think it's worth, like, explaining, like, how it works because it does seem like it triggered some bans. There was one report of an individual who got banned from Resy because they were absolutely spamming to get reservations to restaurants.

And there was another example of somebody who was at the US Open, was on the fancam, and then that was really cool. And as 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 community.

But 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.

Emailing the media contact. But they did wind up getting the video.

Yeah, it worked.

And it was mutually beneficial. And you could 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 that being popular. But people are doing all sorts of stuff. The classic example is like go save money, get refunds, do that to Sort of stuff, but people are having fun with that. So many demos. This 3D website that pulls apart the male anatomy into 2,234 modeled pieces. I shared this with a friend who was trying to like explain in one video what to get like their wheels turning. I think this is a good example. I wonder how much of this was like individually modeled versus pulled from an existing model and then just Animated, but certainly works well.

It's trailer time.

Okay, it's trailer time.

We 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 filmed before she went to prison.

I can promise you that.

A24's doing care.

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. Why would I deceive you? There's no— there's no reason for me to do that.

Okay.

The acting is so good.

Okay, good shot.

How long is this being real right now?

I'm always being real.

The team is stoked. Looks beautiful.

Uh, saw a post, somebody saying it feels like I'm living in a simulation because this media product is like perfectly within—

Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

You would think that, you would, 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. But, but in—

The Theranos story was really big.

Yeah.

She was on the COVID 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. 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 her relevant. Like, there's a way—

Yeah, there was some speculation that maybe it was Nathan that got access to the account.

Completely disagree with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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. So it's certainly possible, but I just don't, I just don't think that's reasonable at all. I think they're her posts.

How much do we know outside of the trailer though? Like, we don't know.

Well, this was leaked something like a year ago from a journalist who got the story, and it was widely denied that it was happening, and 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 But before when she had to report to the prison. She gets out in 2030, so coming up 3 years, 4 years away. And so 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 we don't know—

You thinking what I'm thinking?

What?

SBF, Nathan Fielder.

Ooh.

The 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 Fielder have in the can? Who knows? There's a rumor that he's secretly running a boy band right now. There's this rumor that there's a boy band that's popular on TikTok. This is real. It's popular on TikTok that's entirely invented by him.

Boyfriend Hub.

Yeah. Are you familiar with this?

Really?

I thought you were gonna say he's Nathan Fielder's SD kit. Stay with us in the trailer zone. Trailer dropped just this morning.

What is the image?

Wait, pause. Was that a Valkyrie?

Yeah.

Okay.

Continue. So the visuals are already incredible.

They really are. I'm pretty sure that's a Valkyrie. It might be a Valhalla.

We've created a machine that will solve the world's problems. We don't teach it.

Gate check. Gate check.

You nailed it.

Gate check. Oh, the gate. Yeah, for sure.

Open Pandora's box together. The future is inevitable.

Countries will fall.

Industries are gonna collapse.

The voice is still Eduardo Saverin, but the styling— and the crazy thing is I have that exact backpack.

Get to be the ones.

I think I got it recommended by MKBHD.

Shepherd people into this new world.

Lots of cameos. Not cameos, but—

I'm so excited to see it.

Dramatic.

Dramatic.

Be interesting.

It'll be interesting to see the, the takeaway. People in the chat are, uh, back and forth Is it too soon? Is it unnecessary? Is it gonna be something that, like The Social Network, is divisive but also oddly inspiring to a certain cohort of entrepreneurs? We'll see. We'll see what the reactions are.

Yeah.

Do you think that was— do you think Hollywood took away any lesson from The Social Network in that they were trying to frame Mark Zuckerberg as this generally Troubled person, and then a lot of people came away feeling like, wow, I want to be like Mark Zuckerberg.

Yeah, sort of an unintended consequence of it. I don't know.

I don't know.

I mean, they're going back for a second scoop of the ice cream with The Social Network, The Social Reckoning. Is there a trailer out or just images? I think we saw that too. So it'll be interesting to see what happens there.

But get your tuxes ready, going back to back. Artificial, Social Reckoning, and then capping it off with—

You Can See Everything.

Yes.

And then also the To Catch a Predator movie. That's going to be a good one too.

Yeah. Outside of tech world.

Yeah, I guess you're right.

Yeah.

But still—

Triple feature. Yeah.

It just feels like it's a year of niche movies that I expect to be breakouts, I guess. Along with like Backrooms and Obsession and then these two movies and then the documentaries. There's a lot of things that are like oddly specific, but I would expect they do well.

But I don't know.

We'll see.

And while we're at it, let's stay in the trailer zone and let's pull up the Social Reckoning, the official teaser.

But I am. I am here to help Facebook, not hurt it. Okay?

You send me a message. Who would you like to talk about?

The chairman gavels the session to order. You'll read your opening statement, which we'll skip past for now. That's a separate session.

And which one is this about? I don't, I don't think this is based on the politics, right? It's not Cambridge Analytica. It's the Frances Haugen and your occupation, teenage girl. Whistleblower thing, which honestly looks a lot different in the backdrop of the addiction trials. I wonder if they were trying to get this out before the trials.

Hang on, I don't understand what you're saying.

Aren't you a tech reporter?

Ish.

Ish?

These guys are counting on the next round of congressional testimony to make you likable, Mark. I'm happy to lend a hand, but I think you're doomed.

This company and that guy Are playing an unprecedented role in our lives.

The fire hose of bad information you are injecting into the air supply is becoming jet-powered.

I'm a free speech absolutist. I'm not the one who's lying, and I'm not stopping them from seeing someone who is.

Anxiety, depression of teenage girls got worse as a result of time spent on the platform. Senior leadership knows and is doing nothing.

I know there are easier enemies to make. The mafia. So what would you need? To stand up the story, the internal documents.

This is a material violation of my NDA.

We're twice as big as the biggest country on Earth. We're not frightened of Congress. We're post-government around here. Please.

Who is that supposed to be?

Please let me quote that.

We have 102 hours to get everything.

She's going to get sued into small pieces.

I don't want to be made an example of by a guy with unlimited resources.

Harm, I promise you, I will not cause you.

Yeah, so Chad is calling it out, but I don't think that. I think this one. I think this one's gonna flop for sure because of the lack of because cars. Well, lack of supercars, and this is just not top. This story is no longer top of mind.

Sure.

Yeah, people want to hear about like the talent wars. They don't want to hear about like this kind of stuff.

They do. The talent wars. If there's no Alex Wang character. I'm not, I'm not paying good money.

Sashane says, ooh, technology is so scary.

Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, they, I mean, they should do more tech movies. Maybe, uh, maybe says it will flop because no Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Yeah, this was in the pre—

that's true—

jiu-jitsu era in the script.

Yeah, UFC.

Uh, if there's the, the Social Network 3 and all the scenes where Zuck is talking, he's in the middle of—

how is it 2026 and we don't have a Salesforce movie.

Seriously.

Like the comeback, the SaaSpocalypse.

Or at least a documentary on the relationship that he has with the dolphins.

That would be great. That would be great.

And the wildlife generally. Here's a concept, Dolphin Force, how one man tamed wild dolphins.

It's maybe the best origin story of a tech company ever.

Benioff famously conceived the vision for Salesforce in 1999 while swimming with a pod of roughly 100 dolphins off the coast of Hawaii during a sabbatical. Feeling one with the pod, he envisioned cloud-delivered enterprise software, leading him to quit Oracle and secure $2 million in seed funding from his mentor, Larry Ellison.

Yeah.

Incredible.

Anyway, in other news, lots of craziness in the AI world, lots of new models. But the jobs apocalypse has been officially postponed by The Economist. An AI jobs boom is here, and people have a wide range of takes on this. Is it just postponed? Is it permanently postponed? Kevin Bryan summed it up well. He said, "I am shocked, shocked." So he's being sarcastic, of course. Shocked to find out that a productivity-enhancing, investment-supporting technology is good for workers. Knowing nothing else, this should be your prior because this is how productivity in competitive markets almost always works. A new technology comes out, it supports investment, it enhances productivity. Everyone hires to go after all the, all the different battles. But The Economist breaks it down in a lot more detail with a bunch of charts and a bunch of data. So they say perhaps AI will eventually make many humans unemployable, but there's no sign of it yet. On September 4th, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the American economy added 162,000 jobs in August, far above expectations. The unemployment rate, just 4.1%, lower than almost 90% of months over the past 50 years. Young workers, often cast as AI's first victims, are holding up remarkably well. The gap between unemployment among 20 to 24-year-olds and the overall rate is close to a multi-decade low. Some companies and workers are being severely disrupted by AI. Hiring professional and business services is running 10% below the average from 2015 to 2019. Tech giants like Microsoft and Meta are trimming headcounts as they reorganize their businesses around the technology. Smaller firms such as Block, which is sort of a crazy— smaller firms, but it is smaller than Microsoft and Meta. Block, the owner of Square and Cash App, and Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, are replacing people with bots. American companies have announced some 16,000 AI-related job cuts a month on average. So far this year, according to Challenger, Graeme Christmas, an employment consultancy. But AI-related layoffs get lost in the churning job markets where— so you remember that number. So 16,000 AI-related job cuts a month. In a typical month, the US workforce just churns 1.7 million jobs and then they add 1.8 million jobs. So there's net gains, but you're looking at less than 1% of the layoffs that happen in the economy or job losses or firings, less than 1% is AI-related, which is what The Economist is pointing out here. And the evidence so far is that AI is already creating a lot of jobs to replace those as it has destroyed. The vast sums pouring into data centers and power generation have set off a race for construction and infrastructure workers. AI startups are hiring like there's no tomorrow. Incumbents are racing to keep up with new AI roles and making some workers more productive. AI may be increasing the demand for their services. Add it all up, and the Economist estimates that AI so far has created around 1 million new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 layoffs attributed to AI since mid-2023. We're back. It's September. We're going in the 4th hour. Get ready.

108 days until Christmas.

4th hour.

5th hour.

I got a text from a buddy.

Yeah.

Who saw— or sorry, 107 days. He said he already got his tree up. I can't tell if he's messing with me.

Anyway, thank you for tuning in to TBN. We will be back tomorrow at 11 AM sharp. Rolling Flashbang.

We love you.

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