How Much Did the Navier-Stokes Proof Cost?

Sam Altman says the Navier-Stokes proof cost on the order of $10 million, maybe a little more, in the range of $10 million to $20 million. Nothing was understood then about the scaling laws of teams of agents: the smartest model or a smaller one, many copies or fewer, long rollouts or short ones. One week of math spend was left unconstrained on purpose, to see how far a new approach could go.

He bets the same proof could be redone a year later at one hundredth of the cost, using smarter models and better approaches, not only knowledge of how the proof goes. He expects about 10x a year in how dollars of compute turn into useful work. The average later result cost much less. Math of that kind has added up to hundreds of millions of dollars.