On Tuesday, OpenAI announced that it had found a solution for a famous unsolved problem in mathematics by using a swarm of advanced AI agents. But the occasion quickly unraveled into an explosive scandal, with mathematicians accusing the company of stealing their work.

OpenAI’s purported solution was for one of the so-called Navier-Stokes equations, which mathematically describe how fluids, ranging from wind to ocean currents, move and behave. These differential equations — equations that describe how different quantities change in relation to others — have been used for nearly two centuries with reliable results, but scientists have long wondered if there are scenarios where their predictions break down and describe something that’s physically impossible. In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute listed the Navier-Stokes as one of its six Millennium Problems, with a prize of $1 million for being the first to solve each one.

Enter OpenAI, which claims it found a way to break the Navier-Stokes by unleashing 10,000 of its AI agents on the problem for 88 hours, costing millions of dollars in computing costs, according to OpenAI’s head of research Mark Chen. The long and short of some exceedingly complicated math was that the legions of AI agents identified an apparent scenario in which the equations can describe fluids accelerating to an infinite velocity — resulting a so-called “blowup” or singularity. This, as far as we know, is impossible, thus demonstrating that the equations have a breaking point.

But hours before OpenAI’s formal announcement came an explosive claim from the NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster, who had been working on the problem for years before OpenAI got involved, and was close to publishing his own solution. 

In a lengthy public statement, Buckmaster accused OpenAI’s solution of following a suspiciously similar path to his own, and said that the AI company only poured its resources into the Navier-Stokes after recently learning about the progress Buckmaster and his colleague Levent Alpöge, a mathematician at OpenAI’s biggest rival Anthropic, had been making.

Adding to the suspicion, Buckmaster said he had been using OpenAI’s Codex tool to help check his work, insinuating that the company accessed his sessions, accidentally or intentionally, to copy it. When Buckmaster asked OpenAI about this, he didn’t get an answer, he claimed.

OpenAI’s response to Buckmaster’s allegations only added fuel to the fire. While denying that its researchers and AI agents accessed or saw the mathematician’s work before it was publicly released, OpenAI also admitted that it “cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.”

That’s not all. Buckmaster also alleges that OpenAI mathematician Sébastien Bubeck pressured him to cut Alpöge as an author on his paper, which Buckmaster implies is because Alpöge worked for Anthropic. When Buckmaster refused and threatened to go public, Bubeck allegedly replied, “Why would you ruin your career?”

Bubeck has denied Buckmaster’s version of events, calling them “false and inflammatory” in a public statement.

The academic community has largely been appalled by what they’re seeing.

Terence Tao, a renowned mathematician and leading authority on differential equations, excoriated what AI was doing to the field.

“We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a massive amount of AI-powered effort to flatten it before the original research project has time to reach its full potential,” Tao wrote on Mastodon. “The incentives may now be pointing in the direction of no longer sharing any promising research directions with the broader community, which would reverse centuries of traditions of open science and do serious long-term damage to the future of the field.”

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It’s no exaggeration to say that if you own an LG smart TV, it might be spying on you.

The widely respected computer hardware experts at the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus found that the company’s boob tubes and pricey OLEDs can scan your Wi-Fi network to search for the devices you own, secretly record audio logs of your conversations using built-in microphones, and keep tabs on what you’re watching and listening to.

It collects all this data, Gamers Nexus found, even when the TV is disconnected from the internet and appears to be off in standby mode.

To unearth these surreptitious practices, Gamers Nexus partnered up with independent security researchers and Level1Techs. Their resulting two-hour video report has since been picked up by other trusted cybersecurity voices like Malwarebytes.

By digging into the firmware and intercepting some of the data the TVs were sending, the team found that the TVs were extensively scanning local Wi-Fi networks to log what devices were on it, including phones, computers, and other smart-home devices like thermostats. It even collected the names of nearby Wi-Fi networks, creating an alarmingly detailed picture of all the devices in a user’s household.

Why might that information be relevant to LG? The TVs also use a controversial technology called automated content recognition (ACR) that routinely scans and determines what you’re watching so it can sell that data to advertisers. 

Combined together, they build an advanced and disturbingly comprehensive profile of what you watch and the devices you use, Gamers Nexus warn. All this data is sent back to LG Ad Solutions, its lucrative advertising business.

LG TVs, on top of it all, can also listen to you. Tests showed that their built-in microphones could capture clean audio of nearby conversations and generate transcripts of them, even when the TVs were in standby mode, which most TVs default to when you think you’ve turned them off, with the display powering down. The recording feature continued even when the TVs were unplugged from the internet, storing the audio files locally and uploading them the moment the internet connection was restored.

The researchers also found a vulnerability that allegedly allow a hacker to remotely execute code, though they’re keeping the details on this light so they can responsibly disclose their findings.

Many LG owners are furious about the news.

“LG hardware is just spyware,” fumed a post on the r/LGOLED subreddit. “You[r] TV is wiretapping your whole house.”

Smart TVs collecting data on you isn’t new — ACR in particular is well-documented — but the reported findings here illustrate a degree of invasiveness the public could only speculate about previously.

It’s far from the first time LG has caused a stir over purported privacy violations, either. Another Gamers Nexus investigation last month found that LG monitors were sneakily installing pop-up ads onto customers’ computers. The ensuing controversy caught Microsoft’s attention, with the company demanding LG remove the ads.

More on surveillance: The Real Victims of the AI Surveillance Panopticon? Crime Fiction Writers

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One of the selling points of Tesla’s much-hyped Cybercab — its purpose-built robotaxi — is that it doesn’t need manual controls. That’s why it doesn’t even come with a steering wheel or pedals.

But an early passenger who got to ride one of the self-driving cars after they launched in Austin last week discovered that they secretly have manual controls hidden in a touchscreen — the most practical way to control a car, as everyone knows — after its software glitched out and accidentally revealed them.

The passenger, Matthew Skrzypczak, wrote on X over the weekend that when he got in his Cybercab to take it for a spin, the display, instead of showing an interface to let him start his ride, showed a “virtual joystick for manual driving.” 

“I have a feeling I wasn’t supposed to see this,” he wrote. 

In a video he uploaded, the display shows a splitscreen view of various camera angles and an area that lets you control several of the car’s functions. Crucially, there’s also a touchscreen joystick for shifting the car into gear, which says “forward” at the top and “reverse” at the bottom.

Skrzypczak was able to close the door and honk the horn successfully, but when he tries to move the car it doesn’t budge — which is probably for the best, since there were pedestrians nearby — though this may be because he was simply using the joystick wrong.

This feature is almost certainly intended for Tesla employees, and it’s unclear why a passenger like Skrzypczak, and at least one other who noted the issue, was able to access it. To be clear, manual controls are obviously necessary in case an employee or emergency workers needs to move the vehicle when it’s malfunctioning. But putting it behind a slippery touchscreen is also far less practical than an old-fashioned steering wheel and pedal, which is all being done so CEO Elon Musk can have bragging rights.

The workaround hasn’t proved amusing to regulators. Shortly after Tesla launched Cybercab rides in Austin, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an audit into how Tesla self-certified that the vehicles were safe for the road despite their lack of conventional manual controls.

More on Tesla: Tesla Driver Killed After Self-Driving Mode Stops in the Middle of a Highway

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