There are seven questions in pure mathematics deemed important enough by the Clay Mathematics Institute, a nonprofit foundation devoted to “furthering the beauty, power and universality of mathematical thought,” that each of their solutions carries a prize of $1 million. To date only one of these “Millennium Prize Problems,” as the foundation calls them, has been settled: the Poincaré conjecture. A problem in topology—the study of the properties of shapes that survive stretching and bending—it had been “open” for almost a century before it was proved in the early 2000s by the Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman. But on September 8 OpenAI announced that it had settled a second Millennium Problem. While Perelman had turned down the prize money (as well as mathematics’ most prestigious award, the Fields Medal), rejecting both the notion of celebrity for mathematicians and the conceit that credit should be given to him alone, OpenAI issued a press release.…