OpenAI Deploys 10,000-Agent Swarm to Solve Navier-Stokes Math Prize

OpenAI talks GPT-6 Astra and Millenium Prize, researchers create WeWorm exploit & IBM’s US Open app — IBM

IBM

The breakthrough resolution of the Navier-Stokes problem proves multi-agent swarms can conquer grand-challenge mathematics, but the multimillion-dollar compute bill shows advanced AI capabilities remain governed by capital concentration rather than unguided model autonomy.

AI-assisted summary of OpenAI talks GPT-6 Astra and Millenium Prize, researchers create WeWorm exploit & IBM’s US Open app — original source. Check the original for full context.

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Key ideas

  • OpenAI reportedly used its Astra model in a 10,000-agent swarm architecture to solve the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, consuming an estimated tens of millions of dollars in compute for an 88-hour run verified via Lean in 17 hours. (7:22)
  • Cybersecurity startup Caliph utilized AI tooling to uncover an unconventional memory corruption vulnerability in WeChat's VoIP stack, demonstrating an automated, zero-click worm exploit dubbed 'WeWorm' prior to responsible disclosure and patching by Tencent. (23:45)
  • IBM deployed an advanced tennis analytics stack for the US Open serving 14 million fans, combining XGBoost and logistic regression models for win forecasting with computer vision limb tracking that processes 1.2 billion skeletal data points across 254 singles matches. (20:00)
  • OpenAI's Astra model achieved 95.9% accuracy on the BenchCAD benchmark, outperforming GPT-5.6 and Fable in generating runnable CAD code and spatial 3D models directly from 2D engineering views. (5:00)

Detailed notes

## Background Published by IBM on their RSS/podcast feed on September 11, 2026, this episode (#124) of Mixture of Experts features host Tim Hwang and co-host David Zax discussing fast-moving AI developments. According to the show description, the panel breaks down new model advances from OpenAI, emerging cybersecurity threats, and the latest digital AI tools deployed for US Open fans.

## TL;DR The panel examines OpenAI's flagship Astra model, dissecting its massive hardware footprint, BenchCAD evaluation, and multi-agent swarm architecture used to solve the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem. Aaron Baughman demonstrates IBM's real-time AI capabilities deployed at the US Open, including pre-match prediction models, live momentum tracking, Match Chat, and computer-vision-based serve biomechanics tracking. The episode shifts to cybersecurity with an analysis of Caliph's AI-discovered 'WeWorm' zero-click vulnerability in WeChat's VoIP stack. Finally, Olivia Buzek and the panel weigh the economics of AI-driven vulnerability discovery, concluding that the primary risk lies not in autonomous software, but in which well-funded actors control the massive compute needed to run these exploits.

## Atmosphere & style The conversation balances conversational tech banter with deep, grounded technical scrutiny, bouncing seamlessly between enthusiastic demo showcases and existential cybersecurity dread. The hosts and panelists maintain a lively, collaborative rapport, poking fun at hyperbolic industry claims while treating underlying compute realities and mathematics with serious rigor. It feels like an insider roundtable of pragmatic practitioners who refuse to get swept up in marketing hype, guiding listeners through genuine scientific breakthroughs, impressive enterprise deployments, and chilling threat models with equal clarity.

## Bulletin - `07:22` OpenAI reportedly used its Astra model in a 10,000-agent swarm architecture to solve the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, consuming an estimated tens of millions of dollars in compute for an 88-hour run verified via Lean in 17 hours. - `23:45` Cybersecurity startup Caliph utilized AI tooling to uncover an unconventional memory corruption vulnerability in WeChat's VoIP stack, demonstrating an automated, zero-click worm exploit dubbed 'WeWorm' prior to responsible disclosure and patching by Tencent. - `20:00` IBM deployed an advanced tennis analytics stack for the US Open serving 14 million fans, combining XGBoost and logistic regression models for win forecasting with computer vision limb tracking that processes 1.2 billion skeletal data points across 254 singles matches. - `05:00` OpenAI's Astra model achieved 95.9% accuracy on the BenchCAD benchmark, outperforming GPT-5.6 and Fable in generating runnable CAD code and spatial 3D models directly from 2D engineering views.

## Key takeaways - `00:00` Flagship model demos that handle routine tasks like DoorDash orders raise questions about compute efficiency versus the necessity of throwing massive models at basic human interface challenges. - `00:00` True Artificial General Intelligence requires autonomous problem decomposition, tool use, and digital labor execution rather than isolated multimodal parlor tricks. - `00:00` Training massive frontier models like Astra demands staggering physical infrastructure, with rumors citing roughly 100,000 Blackwell NVLink 72 systems. - `05:00` Astra's 95.9% accuracy on BenchCAD reflects an industry shift toward instructing models to execute autonomous engineering and spatial design rather than simple query-answering. - `05:00` Enterprise adoption continues to prioritize latency, operational cost, and task-specific architectures over frontier scientific reasoning models of Astra's scale. - `07:22` The reported Navier-Stokes proof relied on an orchestrated multi-agent swarm of 10,000 AI agents sharing chain-of-thought pathways and leveraging Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. - `10:00` Human agency was essential in solving Navier-Stokes, as human researchers strategically directed compute toward fluid dynamics after the model reached an intermediate milestone across the Millennium Prize problems. - `10:00` Formal verification of complex mathematical outputs using tools like the Lean theorem prover can drastically compress evaluation time relative to multi-day agent generation cycles. - `15:44` IBM's US Open digital platform integrates XGBoost and logistic regression with dynamic point-by-point momentum decay equations to generate live win probabilities. - `20:00` Computer vision pipelines track 21 skeletal joints at 50 frames per second to evaluate serve efficiency and mechanics across sequential preparation, strike, and follow-through phases. - `20:00` Conversational sports interfaces like Match Chat serve as intermediate engagement bridges, translating live context into graph-based agent queries tailored to diverse fan personas. - `23:45` The Caliph WeWorm exploit highlights that AI tools can automate the weaponization of zero-day vulnerabilities into zero-click propagation vectors within ubiquitous consumer apps. - `26:45` AI lowers the barrier of entry for discovering obscure memory corruption flaws across complex, unconventional attack surfaces like VoIP stacks. - `26:45` Automated zero-day exploit discovery remains constrained by the immense compute costs required to brute-force complex attack pathways, shifting the primary security threat to actors controlling massive financial and hardware capital.

## Detailed walkthrough ### `00:00` OpenAI Astra, Demos, and the True Meaning of AGI

Tim Hwang kicks off episode 124 of *Mixture of Experts* with co-host David Zax (staff writer for IBM Think) and panelists Olivia Buzek (staff AI engineer), Aaron Baughman (IBM Fellow), and Bri Kopecki (AI Customer Success Engineer). The episode lines up three central discussions: IBM's tech deployment at the US Open, emerging cybersecurity alarms surrounding WeWorm, and major announcements coming out of OpenAI concerning their new flagship model, Astra. Opening the Astra segment, David describes the flashy product demos that have become standard industry fare—where presenters step into a specialized room to converse naturally with an AI, showcase real-time conversions of 2D renderings into 3D objects, and order food deliveries on the fly. David questions whether this breakthrough matches the claims of NVIDIA's CEO that society has finally reached Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Olivia Buzek immediately raises skepticism regarding the immense compute footprint powering such feats. She points out that using huge, token-hungry models simply to manipulate a desktop interface or order DoorDash is fundamentally inefficient, as lightweight harnesses around smaller models could achieve the same utility. Olivia stresses that the field needs to reconsider whether it is tackling foundational challenges correctly:

> “And so I think what worries me the most is like, are we approaching problems the right way as humans, or are we simply throwing bigger and bigger models at problems without thinking through what the actual implications are.”

Aaron Baughman pushes back on premature declarations of AGI, explaining that the community still lacks a unified definition. To him, an AGI would need to autonomously grasp an unseen problem, acquire missing knowledge, devise an execution plan, use software tools, and perform labor like a high-functioning digital employee. More critically, he notes the staggering physical cost of training Astra, reporting rumors that it required roughly 100,000 Blackwell NVLink 72 systems—an infrastructure demand equivalent to the electrical power consumption of an entire continental U.S. region.

- Panelists: Tim Hwang (host), David Zax (co-host), Olivia Buzek (staff AI engineer), Aaron Baughman (IBM Fellow), Bri Kopecki (AI Customer Success Engineer). - Reported compute footprint for Astra: approximately 100,000 Blackwell NVLink 72 systems.

`05:00` BenchCAD Capabilities vs. Enterprise Utility

Aaron highlights Astra’s actual performance on specialized benchmarks, singling out the BenchCAD benchmark. Astra attained a 95.9% accuracy score, while competing models like GPT-5.6 and Fable languished in the low 80s. Rather than just asking text-based queries, the model takes multiple 2D engineering views, interprets the spatial environment, generates runnable CAD code, and fabricates 3D models compared directly against true geometric specifications. Aaron observes this marks a broader industry pivot from merely asking an AI for answers to instructing an AI to conduct autonomous engineering work.

Bri Kopecki reframes the breakthrough through an enterprise lens, noting that corporate clients rarely need a model of Astra’s colossal size or raw scientific reasoning for day-to-day business operations. While she acknowledges the value of pushing technological boundaries and admires NVIDIA's hardware innovations, real-world deployments prioritize speed, cost, and task-appropriate architectures over sheer scale:

> “I haven't yet to see a use case or as of today or as of this, this or last week, where my customers would have needed a model of this magnitude.”

- Astra BenchCAD benchmark score: 95.9% accuracy. - Comparison benchmarks: GPT-5.6 and Fable both scored in the lower 80% range.

`07:22` The Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize and Swarm Architecture

The conversation shifts to Astra’s reported breakthrough in pure mathematics: solving the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems designated by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000 with a $1 million prize. David and Aaron explain the physics behind the problem, which has resisted mathematical proof for nearly 90 years. It evaluates whether smooth initial conditions in fluid dynamics can mathematically break down into infinite velocities—a phenomenon David colorfully nicknames the “exploding water problem”:

> “I call it the exploding water problem because apparently they've proven that water can spontaneously explode, which sounds awesome.”

Aaron explains that the true technical marvel was not single-model deduction, but OpenAI's multi-agent swarm architecture. OpenAI unleashed a coordinated network of roughly 10,000 AI agents. Governed by central coordinators, these sub-agents dynamically acquired external tools through MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers, shared chain-of-thought pathways, and systematically divided the problem space to execute wide-ranging mathematical explorations. David adds an element of drama to the announcement, noting the behind-the-scenes "soap opera": rumors circulated that a team of human researchers at NYU and Anthropic were on the verge of publishing their own Navier-Stokes proof, prompting OpenAI to rapidly spend tens of millions of dollars in compute to solve the problem first and claim the $1 million prize.

```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Astra Swarm Agent Architecture accDescr: Orchestration workflow showing Astra directing 10,000 agents with MCP tools and chain-of-thought reasoning to resolve the Navier-Stokes equations.

subgraph Orchestration ["Orchestration Layer"] A["Astra Swarm Coordinator"] end

subgraph AgentSwarm ["Swarm Exploration (10,000 AI Agents)"] B1["Sub-Agent Pool 1"] B2["Sub-Agent Pool 2"] B3["Sub-Agent Pool N"] end

subgraph Execution ["Tool Integration & Reasoning"] C["MCP Server Tools"] D["Chain-of-Thought Workflows"] end

subgraph Output ["Target Discovery"] E["Navier-Stokes Singularity / Proof"] end

A --> B1 A --> B2 A --> B3 B1 --> C B2 --> D B3 --> C C --> E D --> E ```

- Background: Clay Mathematics Institute established seven Millennium Prize Problems in 2000, offering $1 million per proof; Navier-Stokes is the second problem claimed to be solved. - Implementation: OpenAI deployed an orchestration of 10,000 AI agents using MCP server tool retrieval and chain-of-thought exploration. - Cost disparity: An estimated tens of millions of dollars of compute time was expended to win a $1 million cash prize.

`10:00` Human Agency in AI Breakthroughs and Real-World Applications

The discussion opens with banter around the real-world implications of solving fluid dynamics equations like Navier-Stokes, joking about whether it is even safe to take a shower now that fluid behavior can be modeled mathematically. David Zax notes that having a proof generated through AI gives mathematicians something concrete to examine, though Aaron Baughman advises caution before declaring it absolute ground truth: “Let's just wait and see what that ground truth actually is.” However, Aaron notes the litmus test looks very promising, particularly because competing mathematicians are already disputing priority and claiming they had reached the solution first—a reliable signal that the AI's result is close to the real answer.

David highlights that the core of the Navier-Stokes achievement is human orchestration rather than an unguided AI breakthrough. When OpenAI’s Astra was running on all seven Millennium Prize Problems, humans guided the process: after Astra solved an intermediate milestone, researchers made the strategic choice to steer massive compute directly into Navier-Stokes. Addressing Bri Kopecki, David asks how she views this human-in-the-loop collaboration. Bri agrees emphatically, explaining that human intellect, taste, and creativity remain essential for setting priorities and directing compute resources:

> “Yeah, I think that I love how you're framing this because it shows to the world that regardless of how powerful AI has become and is becoming, it still requires human intellect, human creativity and human collaboration to get those answers to these huge problems.”

Bri reassures listeners worried about immediate job displacement that human brains are still fundamentally relevant. She expresses immense optimism for downstream applications, arguing that if 10,000 agents running for 88 hours can tackle a Millennium problem—verified via the Lean theorem prover in just 17 hours—similar techniques will revolutionize health and climate science. She cites podcast discussions predicting that AI and quantum physics will eventually cure all cancers and eliminate fatal diseases, noting that this scale of automated reasoning brings humanity vastly closer to solving major global crises.

- Astra initially churned across all seven Millennium Prize Problems before human researchers pivoted compute specifically toward Navier-Stokes after an intermediate breakthrough. - The initial model solution required 88 hours of agent runtime. - Formal verification of the proof into Lean took only 17 hours to evaluate whether the 10,000 agents' output was mathematically sound.

---

`13:46` IBM and the US Open: Bringing AI to 14 Million Tennis Fans

David pivots the conversation from curing cancer and solving climate change to Aaron Baughman’s primary beat: sports analytics. Aaron introduces IBM’s long-standing partnership with the United States Tennis Association (USTA), which spans over 30 years since 1992, designed to transform the digital fan experience for the US Open. While only a small fraction of the tournament's 14 million global fans can attend the matches in person, IBM uses AI to bring match insights and real-time storytelling directly to viewers on digital platforms.

Aaron emphasizes that this year the team elevated the platform by combining predictive machine learning, real-time momentum tracking, and generative agent experiences. They even tackled grand-challenge biomechanics: tracking athlete limbs and joint movements to evaluate player mechanics, especially on serves.

```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: IBM US Open AI Match Analytics Workflow accDescr: Pipeline showing pre-match forecasting, real-time live match processing, and agentic fan engagement tools.

subgraph PreMatch["Pre-Match Analytics"] A["Media Volume & Sentiment"] --> C["Pre-Match Likelihood to Win"] B["Head-to-Head & Surface Stats"] --> C C -->|"XGBoost + Logistic Regression"| D["Win Odds Forecast"] end

subgraph LiveMatch["Real-Time Live Engine"] E["Point-by-Point Data Feed"] --> F["Dynamic Momentum Equation"] D --> F F --> G["Live Likelihood to Win"] G -->|"Confluent Messaging"| H["Agentic Marketplace"] H --> I["Key Moments Text Generation"] end

subgraph FanExperience["Interactive Layer"] I --> J["Match Chat & 3D Replay"] K["Graph-Based AI Agents"] --> J end ```

---

`15:44` Live Demos: Win Likelihood, Real-Time Momentum, and Match Chat

Sharing his screen during the live US Open tournament, Aaron walks through the digital tools on USOpen.org, focusing on Jessica Pegula’s recent quarterfinal victory over Emma Navarro. Starting with the pre-match preview, Aaron reveals the mechanics behind IBM’s Likelihood to Win:

> “So what happens is we have the system that ranks all of the players. We have pre-match forecasters that attempt to say what the volume of the media is being written about them, what the sentiment of different factors are. And then we also look at their head-to-head stats, if they have any.”

The system processes player surface records (hard court, clay, grass) through two classical machine learning models—XGBoost trees and logistic regression. In the Pegula-Navarro match, the pre-match model assigned Pegula a 77% likelihood of winning, which proved accurate. Aaron notes IBM’s pre-match prediction accuracy consistently hovers in the 60% range across the tournament.

Aaron then demonstrates the in-match capabilities: - **Live Likelihood to Win**: The model is bootstrapped from the pre-match win likelihood and dynamically shifts on a point-by-point basis using an internal momentum equation with situation-specific boosters and decay rates. - **Key Moments Generation**: As every point is won or lost, data streams across Confluent to an agentic marketplace. The system detects turning points and generates automated text recaps (e.g., summarizing Pegula closing out a 2-1 set victory over Navarro) to act as a second-screen companion for fans. - **Match Chat**: Aaron accepts the terms and conditions on screen to demo Match Chat, a conversational tool allowing fans to interrogate match data. The architecture translates fan queries into prompts grounded in live tournament context, dispatching them across racing graph-based agents to fetch and synthesize stats in real time.

`20:00` Limb Tracking, Match Chat Personas, and IBM's Serve Quality

The conversation opens with Aaron Baughman explaining how IBM's tennis analytics platform handles scale and tailors itself to different kinds of sports fans. David Zax asks whether IBM gathers data on who is actually using these digital experiences, noting that his own family embodies two extremes: one fan who just likes to tune in casually and watch the ball go back and forth, and another who is intensely data-driven. Aaron confirms that they track analytics and build for distinct user personas:

> "What, you know, what I showed you like Match Chat is, is for, you know, sort of the middle of the road. It's not necessarily targeted towards that hardcore fan or the novice, but it's someone sort of in the middle, right?"

Aaron explains that Match Chat serves as a bridge for someone who wants data to transition into a hardcore fan, while also remaining accessible to busy users looking for quick surface-level insights. Because users sign in and favorite specific players, the team can correlate these user profiles back to the types of queries asked within Match Chat to map out user behavior.

Turning to IBM's technical capabilities, Aaron showcases an advanced computer vision feature: limb tracking to assess serve quality, built using IBM's watsonx platform. The system tracks 21 distinct skeletal points across a tennis player's body at 50 frames per second. Over the course of the tournament, this pipeline processes 1.2 billion data points across all 254 singles matches. It evaluates two primary metrics: - **Effectiveness:** Whether the ball lands inside the targeted court polygon. - **Efficiency:** The mechanics of the racket swing and body motion.

```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: Serve Phase Decomposition Pipeline accDescr: Pipeline decomposing a tennis serve into mechanical stages to evaluate quality and efficiency. subgraph Prep ["Preparation"] A["Start Phase"] --> B["Loading Phase"] B --> C["Cocking Phase"] end subgraph Strike ["Strike Execution"] C --> D["Acceleration"] D --> E["Ball Contact"] end subgraph FollowThrough ["Completion"] E --> F["Deceleration"] F --> G["Finish & Follow-Through"] end ```

The system breaks every serve down into sequential phases: start, loading, cocking (raising the racket into position), acceleration downward toward the ball, contact, deceleration, and the finish/follow-through. Rules evaluate the mechanics across these phases. Fans can ask questions about serve quality directly in Match Chat, and mobile users receive a personalized live home-screen card highlighting serve quality insights. Aaron calls the tool a first of its kind and expresses excitement about expanding limb tracking to other shot types. Tim Hwang praises the feature, noting that every time Aaron joins *Mixture of Experts*, the underlying platform has visibly advanced.

`23:45` The WeWorm Zero-Click Exploit and WeChat Security

Shifting from sports and scientific breakthroughs to cybersecurity, Tim introduces what he calls "the dark side" of recent AI developments: a story about researchers using AI to discover vulnerabilities and engineer exploits, specifically a menace dubbed "WeWorm." David Zax shares his genuine anxiety about the discovery, joking that he used to worry about the monster in the shower as a kid, but is now terrified of his phone.

A cybersecurity startup named Caliph used AI tooling to locate a zero-day vulnerability in WeChat—the ubiquitous Chinese messaging, payment, and lifestyle app used by over a billion people. Caliph's AI did not simply discover a bug; they demonstrated that it could be weaponized into an automated, zero-click worm. A malicious VoIP call could compromise a device without requiring the victim to answer or interact. Once compromised, the malware could propagate exponentially to the user's contacts. Caliph adhered to responsible disclosure practices by alerting WeChat's parent company, Tencent, back in July. Tencent patched the flaw before the news was made public months later.

David admits that as a non-technical observer, the incident sounds terrifying:

> "I am personally I'm not a technical person but I'm terrified because this would seem like an exploit on the level of what we are more familiar from really sophisticated state actors."

David asks where everyone's "P-Doom" (probability of doom) should be sitting given how quickly AI appears to be accelerating both bug discovery and automated exploit generation. Bri Kopecki validates the concern, recalling her time living in Shanghai between 2015 and 2016 when she used WeChat to pay her rent, highlighting how deeply embedded the platform is in daily life. However, Bri cautions against outright panic:

> "I think the key takeaway here is that AI... Did it make the hacking more powerful? I mean, a hacking case is always significant event, it made it more accessible."

She emphasizes that high-profile vulnerabilities surface monthly, and while AI lowers the barrier to entry for uncovering them, the tech industry must rely on security researchers to develop defensive countermeasures.

`26:45` Unconventional Attack Surfaces and the Economics of AI Exploit Discovery

David turns to Olivia Buzek to unpack the technical details behind Caliph's disclosures. Caliph reported that the vulnerability stemmed from a memory corruption bug inside WeChat's VoIP stack, warning that this represented an "unconventional attack surface" common across modern messaging platforms. David asks why AI seems to be suddenly surfacing vulnerabilities in obscure, overlooked corners of legacy software stacks.

Olivia offers both a philosophical and technical explanation. Software engineering, like all human craftsmanship, is fundamentally imperfect:

> "There have always been rough edges in everything that humans have ever created. It's actually one of the core beauties of being human is that the things that we create are not generally perfect objects."

Drawing a comparison to *wabi-sabi*—the Japanese art form of repairing broken pottery to embrace flaws—she points out that building entirely vulnerability-free software is impossible. Historically, finding obscure memory corruption flaws required painstaking human reverse-engineering. Today, while language and reasoning models do not possess independent agency or act unprompted, their ability to execute creative reasoning against broad, open-ended prompts (such as "go off and look for vulnerabilities") has expanded dramatically.

However, Olivia stresses that this automated capability is heavily constrained by economics and compute resources: - Caliph's disclosure did not reveal the token or dollar cost required to discover and construct the WeWorm exploit. - By comparison, solving the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem with OpenAI's Astra model reportedly consumed approximately $15 million in compute to win a $1 million Millennium Prize reward. - Finding complex zero-click exploits via AI brute-force similarly requires massive, multi-million-dollar compute budgets.

Olivia argues that fear should not be directed at the models themselves, but at who commands the capital:

> "So personally, my fear is a little bit proportional to who holds those resources and what their priorities are."

Tim concludes that while lowering technical barriers is concerning, massive capital was already an asymmetrical weapon in cybersecurity: previously, an adversary with $15 million could simply hire elite black-hat hackers to find the same zero-day flaws. Tim wraps up the episode by thanking Bri Kopecki, Aaron Baughman, and Olivia Buzek for providing a blend of hope, grounded technical nuance, and existential terror, before signing off until next week's episode.

## Notable quotes > `00:00` And so I think what worries me the most is like, are we approaching problems the right way as humans, or are we simply throwing bigger and bigger models at problems without thinking through what the actual implications are. — Olivia Buzek

> `26:45` There have always been rough edges in everything that humans have ever created. It's actually one of the core beauties of being human is that the things that we create are not generally perfect objects. — Olivia Buzek

## Mentioned OpenAI, GPT-6 Astra, Millennium Prize Problems, Clay Mathematics Institute, Navier-Stokes equations, WeWorm, IBM, US Open, United States Tennis Association, Tim Hwang, David Zax, Olivia Buzek, Aaron Baughman, Bri Kopecki, NVIDIA, Blackwell NVLink 72, BenchCAD, GPT-5.6, Fable, Model Context Protocol, Anthropic, New York University, Lean, Jessica Pegula, Emma Navarro, XGBoost, Confluent, Match Chat, watsonx, Caliph, WeChat, Tencent, DoorDash

## Video description Visit Mixture of Experts podcast page to get more AI content → https://www.ibm.com/think/podcasts/mixture-of-experts It's been a week that proves AI is moving faster than anyone can fully keep up with, unless you’ve got a good backhand. On episode 124 of Mixture of Experts, host Tim Hwang and co-host David Zax are joined by Bri Kopecki, Aaron Baughman, and Olivia Buzek to talk about new advances from OpenAI, new cybersecurity threats, and new tools for US Open fans from IBM. First, OpenAI...

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中文简报

OpenAI部署万级智能体集群攻克纳维尔-斯托克斯数学大奖难题 纳维尔-斯托克斯难题的突破性解决,证明了多智能体集群有能力攻克数学领域的重大挑战,但高达数千万美元的算力账单表明,尖端AI能力仍受制于资本集中度,而非不受约束的模型自主性。 专家组深入探讨了OpenAI的旗舰模型Astra,剖析了其庞大的硬件占用、BenchCAD评测,以及用于攻克纳维尔-斯托克斯千禧年大奖难题的多智能体集群架构。Aaron Baughman展示了IBM在美网公开赛上部署的实时AI功能,包括赛前预测模型、实时动量追踪、赛事聊天互动(Match Chat)以及基于计算机视觉的发球生物力学追踪。本期节目随后转向网络安全领域,分析了Caliph利用AI发现的微信VoIP协议栈“WeWorm”零点击漏洞。最后,Olivia Buzek与专家组共同评估了AI驱动漏洞挖掘的经济性,认为主要风险不在于自动化软件本身,而在于哪些资金雄厚的实体能掌控运行这些利用程序所需的庞大算力。 据报道,OpenAI在其10,000个智能体构成的集群架构中使用了Astra模型,以解决纳维尔-斯托克斯方程的存在性与光滑性问题;该运行过程持续了88小时,据估计消耗了数千万美元算力,并通过Lean在17小时内完成了形式化验证。 (7:22) 网络安全初创公司Caliph利用AI工具发现了微信VoIP协议栈中一个非常规的内存损坏漏洞,并在腾讯进行负责任披露和修补之前,演示了一种被称为“WeWorm”的自动化零点击蠕虫利用程序。 (23:45) IBM为服务1400万球迷的美网公开赛部署了先进的网球分析技术栈,将用于胜率预测的XGBoost与逻辑回归模型,同计算机视觉肢体追踪相结合,在254场单打比赛中处理了12亿个骨骼数据点。 (20:00) OpenAI的Astra模型在BenchCAD基准测试中达到了95.9%的准确率,在直接根据2D工程视图生成可运行的CAD代码和空间3D模型方面,超越了GPT-5.6和Fable。 (5:00)

Reading summary

On IBM's *Mixture of Experts*, panelists evaluated high-compute frontier AI models like OpenAI's Astra, practical sports analytics deployments at the US Open, and automated vulnerability discovery illustrated by the WeWorm zero-click exploit. Frontier Model Scale and Scientific Swarms (0:00) OpenAI's Astra demonstration highlighted a growing divergence between peak computational capability and enterprise practicalities. Aaron Baughman reported rumors that Astra required roughly 100,000 Blackwell NVLink 72 systems to train, scoring 95.9% on the BenchCAD benchmark compared to low-80% scores for GPT-5.6 and Fable. For the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem, OpenAI orchestrated a multi-agent swarm of approximately 10,000 agents using Model Context Protocol (MCP) server tools and chain-of-thought pathways. The multi-agent exploration took 88 hours of runtime, followed by 17 hours of formal verification in Lean. David Zax noted rumors that OpenAI spent tens of millions of dollars in compute to beat competing human researchers to the proof and claim the $1 million prize. Panelists questioned whether colossal architectures align with everyday enterprise needs. Olivia Buzek noted that using token-hungry frontier models for simple tasks like manipulating desktop interfaces or ordering food is fundamentally inefficient. Bri Kopecki emphasized that corporate clients prioritize cost, latency, and task-appropriate architectures over sheer scale, noting that human guidance remains critical to steering model reasoning toward meaningful breakthroughs in science and medicine. Real-Time AI Deployment at the US Open (13:46) IBM demonstrated the targeted application of AI and machine learning during its 30-plus-year partnership with the United States Tennis Association (USTA) to serve 14 million tournament fans. The platform pairs pre-match win likelihood forecasts—generated via XGBoost trees and logistic regression on media volume, sentiment, and head-to-head statistics—with an in-match momentum engine that updates win probabilities point by point. Real-time match data streams over Confluent to trigger automated key moments summaries and power Match Chat, an interactive tool dispatching queries across graph-based agents. To analyze player mechanics, IBM built a limb-tracking system on its watsonx platform to evaluate serve quality across all 254 singles matches. The computer vision pipeline captures 21 skeletal points at 50 frames per second, processing 1.2 billion data points over the tournament. The system decomposes serves into sequential phases—preparation, loading, cocking, acceleration, contact, deceleration, and follow-through—to assess efficiency and whether the ball reaches the intended target zone. WeWorm and the Economics of Automated Exploits (23:45) The panel examined cybersecurity risks stemming from AI-driven vulnerability discovery, centering on cybersecurity startup Caliph's disclosure of "WeWorm." Caliph used AI tooling to locate an obscure memory corruption bug within WeChat's VoIP stack, demonstrating that the flaw could be weaponized into an automated, zero-click worm that spreads to contacts via unprompted calls. Tencent patched the vulnerability after responsible disclosure in July, prior to public reporting. While Bri Kopecki noted that AI lowers the technical barrier to entry for uncovering vulnerabilities, Olivia Buzek framed the risk around capital allocation rather than model autonomy. Human-authored software inherently contains flaws, and while AI models can execute broad reasoning tasks to uncover attack surfaces, brute-forcing complex zero-click exploits requires massive compute budgets. Host Tim Hwang observed that asymmetrical financial capital has always enabled well-funded actors to find zero-day flaws, meaning AI shifts who can direct the tools rather than altering the fundamental threat landscape. Across scientific research, consumer applications, and cybersecurity, frontier AI capabilities remain bounded by high capital costs, physical compute constraints, and the necessity of human orchestration to direct systems toward meaningful tasks.

精炼阅读摘要

在本期 IBM《Mixture of Experts》节目中,主持人与专家小组指出,尽管前沿大模型与自主多智能体在复杂工程、纯数学难题及漏洞挖掘中展现了巨大突破,但其实际落地仍受到极端算力成本的限制,企业应用与安全防御依然高度依赖人类的策略协同与定向引导。 前沿模型评测与通用人工智能定义的争议 (0:00) OpenAI 旗舰模型 Astra 的发布展示了实时 2D 转 3D 以及多模态交互能力,引发了业界关于是否已触达通用人工智能(AGI)的讨论。Aaron Baughman 指出行业对 AGI 尚无统一公认定义,真正的 AGI 应能自主理解陌生问题、获取缺失知识、制定执行策略并借助工具像高阶数字员工一样工作。在具体基准上,Astra 在工程设计基准 BenchCAD 中取得了 95.9% 的准确率,远超 GPT-5.6 和 Fable 的 80% 左右低区间表现,展示出从单纯问答转向执行自主工程任务的跨越。 然而,专家对该类庞大模型的物理开销与实用性提出审慎意见。传闻 Astra 的训练动用了约 10 万套 Blackwell NVLink 72 系统,能源需求相当于美国本土整个大区的用电量。Olivia Buzek 批评单纯利用超大规模模型执行桌面操作或外卖订购是低效的,轻量级模型配合框架即可达成同样目的。Bri Kopecki 则从企业视角指出,现实商业客户在日常运营中鲜少需要如此庞大或具备高深科学推理的模型,部署策略上始终将响应速度、成本效益与任务适配度置于模型规模之上。 纳维-斯托克斯方程突破与群体智能协同 (7:22) 节目深入剖析了 Astra 宣称解决千禧年大奖难题之一——纳维-斯托克斯(Navier-Stokes)存在性与光滑性问题的技术实质。该突破并非源自单一模型的自主推演,而是 OpenAI 调动约 10,000 个 AI 智能体协同组成的群体架构。中央协调器负责分发任务,各子智能体通过模型上下文协议(MCP)服务器动态调用工具并共享思维链路径,将极其广阔的数学探索空间系统化拆解。在 Astra 运行 88 小时生成解法后,形式化验证工具 Lean 仅耗时 17 小时便完成了数学严谨性评估。 David Zax 与 Bri Kopecki 强调,这一成就的核心是人类的主动编排而非无指引的 AI 突破。当 Astra 同时探索全部七个千禧难题时,是在取得阶段性进展后,由人类研究员做出战略决策,才将海量算力精准导向纳维-斯托克斯问题。尽管学术界对优先权和绝对真实性仍有争议,且据估计耗费了数千万美元算力仅赢得 100 万美元奖金,但专家认为这种人在回路(human-in-the-loop)的协作范式若移植至气候科学或医学健康领域,将对复杂危机求解带来深远推动。 体育数据场景的确定性工程与实时分析 (13:46) 相较于纯理论层面的高算力消耗,Aaron Baughman 展示了 IBM 面向美国网球公开赛(US Open)1400 万全球球迷所构建的成熟工业级 AI 体系。赛前预测模块运用经典机器学习框架,整合媒体声量、情感分析、交锋记录及硬地、红土、草地等场地数据,通过 XGBoost 决策树与逻辑回归模型给出胜率预测,整届赛事的基准准确率稳定在 60% 左右(如在佩古拉对阵纳瓦罗的比赛中准确给出了 77% 的胜率预测)。比赛开始后,系统利用带有衰减因子的动态动量方程逐点调整胜率,并通过 Confluent 消息总线将实时事件推送到智能体市场生成关键时刻文字摘要。 在实时互动与生物力学分析方面,平台借助图结构智能体构建了 Match Chat 对话工具,基于当前赛事上下文为处于普通观众与硬核球迷之间的中间层群体提供即时统计检索。依托 watsonx 平台,IBM 部署了计算机视觉肢体追踪系统,以每秒 50 帧的频率实时追踪网球选手全身 21 个骨骼点,在全部 254 场单打比赛中累计处理 12 亿个数据点。该技术将发球拆解为准备、蓄力、引拍、加速、触球、减速与随击等阶段,针对击球有效性与动作效率进行量化评分,开辟了高精度动作分析在赛事直播中的应用落地。 WeWorm 漏洞暴露的算力不对称与安全现实 (23:45) 网络安全初创公司 Caliph 利用 AI 工具在微信的 VoIP 协议栈内存破坏缺陷中发现了零日漏洞,并展示其能被武器化为无需受害者任何交互的“零点击(zero-click)”蠕虫病毒 WeWorm。该漏洞允许恶意 VoIP 通话在未接听状态下感染设备,并向通讯录指数级扩散。Caliph 遵循负责任披露原则于 7 月通知腾讯,后者在漏洞公开前已完成修补。Bri Kopecki 与 David Zax 指出,尽管微信这类国民级应用承载着通讯与支付等核心基础设施,但该事件的本质并非 AI 赋予了前所未有的攻击破坏力,而是显著降低了高级漏洞挖掘的技术门槛。 Olivia Buzek 从工程哲学与经济学角度分析了此现象。她援引日式“残缺之美(wabi-sabi)”理念指出,人类编写的软件天然存在瑕疵,绝对无漏洞的代码并不现实。如今 AI 的多步推理能力能够针对开放式漏洞扫描提示展开高效探索,但这一过程受制于高昂的经济与算力门槛。发现深层零点击漏洞需要消耗巨额算力,正如攻克数学难题耗资超千万美元一样。Tim Hwang 与 Olivia 总结认为,真正的风险并不在于模型本身,而在于谁掌握着数千万美元规模的算力资本;资本历来是不对称网络攻防的核心变量,防御体系必须加快利用自动化工具建立应对机制。 讨论表明,AI 从理论突破走向现实落地的核心制约因素仍是算力经济学。无论是解决基础科学难题,还是挖掘隐蔽安全漏洞,海量算力与资本的结合都在重构竞争格局,而人类在明确目标优先级、架构设计与防范体系建设中的核心主导地位依然无法被完全替代。

Detailed notes — zh

## Background 本期播客由 IBM 于 2026 年 9 月 11 日在 RSS 及网络平台发布。根据页面简介,这是《Mixture of Experts》第 124 期节目,主持人 Tim Hwang 和特约撰稿人 David Zax 携手专家嘉宾 Bri Kopecki、Aaron Baughman 与 Olivia Buzek,共同探讨 OpenAI 的最新大模型进展、全新的网络安全威胁以及 IBM 为美国网球公开赛球迷打造的创新 AI 工具。 ## TL;DR 节目首先深入探讨了 OpenAI 旗舰模型 Astra 的实机演示,剖析了其由 10,000 个协作智能体组成的蜂群架构如何解出困扰物理界近百年的千禧年大奖难题——纳维-斯托克斯方程,并对其高昂的算力成本与企业落地现实进行了理性反思。随后,IBM 专家详细拆解了技术团队在 2024 美网公开赛中落地的全套 AI 系统,包括赛前预测、逐点实时胜率重算、Match Chat 智能对话以及每秒 50 帧的高速生物力学肢体与发球质量分析。最后,嘉宾们聚焦网络安全议题,讨论了初创公司 Caliph 利用 AI 挖掘微信零点击漏洞并构建“WeWorm”蠕虫病毒的事件,从软件不完美性与数千万美元算力经济学的双重视角揭示了 AI 安全的本质与门槛。 ## Atmosphere & style 整场对话呈现出一种兼具极客狂热与冷峻现实主义的专家圆桌氛围。主持团队与嘉宾之间互动默契且富有幽默感,既有从“洗澡流体力学”聊到攻克绝症与 AGI 破局的宏大畅想,也有面对高能耗算力账单和微信零点击蠕虫威胁时的警惕与严肃。聆听体验就像是置身于一场顶级工程师与科技评论员的深夜思辨会,在震撼的硬核技术突破与尖锐的商业经济学审视之间保持着绝佳的张力与平衡。 ## Bulletin - `02:15` OpenAI 推出全新大模型 Astra,并在 BenchCAD 几何基准测试中取得 95.9% 的准确率,训练据称动用了 10 万套英伟达 Blackwell NVLink 72 系统。 - `10:00` OpenAI 组织起由 10,000 个 AI Agent 构成的蜂群集群,耗时 88 小时推导出千禧年难题纳维-斯托克斯方程的证明,并用 Lean 语言在 17 小时内完成了形式化验证。 - `20:00` IBM 全新升级与美网公开赛(US Open)长达 30 余年的合作,首次上线基于 21 个骨骼关节点、50 fps 的发球肢体追踪与质量评估系统,全赛事累计处理 12 亿个数据点。 - `22:36` 网络安全初创公司 Caliph 利用 AI 在微信 VoIP 协议栈中挖掘出内存破坏漏洞,构建出可指数级传播的零点击蠕虫“WeWorm”,引发业界对 AI 降低网络攻击门槛的担忧。 ## Key takeaways - `00:00` Astra 展示了端到端的多模态交互能力,能够实时将 2D 图纸转化为 3D CAD 模型并直接调用外部服务完成复杂任务,推动 AI 从“回答问题”转向“承担实际工作”。 - `02:15` 专家指出盲目追求更大参数模型存在算力资源浪费,日常业务完全可以通过简单脚本驱动低阶模型实现,而非动用巨型大模型。 - `05:40` 企业客户的核心诉求集中在执行效率、低延迟与确定性结果,通用业务场景中极少有需要纳维-斯托克斯级别超大参数模型的现实用例。 - `05:40` 攻克纳维-斯托克斯方程并非单个模型顿悟,而是总协调员调度 10,000 个基于思维链并连接外部工具服务器(MCP)的 Agent 蜂群协同完成的大规模并行探索。 - `07:34` 千禧年大奖单项悬赏金仅为 100 万美元,而 OpenAI 为抢先冲线所消耗的算力成本估算高达数千万美元,呈现出极端的技术与商业倒挂。 - `10:00` 纳维-斯托克斯证明是典型的人机协作成果:由人类研究员在中间命题取得进展时研判决策并集中算力,再由 AI 蜂群生成推演、形式化系统验证。 - `15:40` IBM 为美网公开赛构建了实时赛事分析平台,通过 XGBoost 与逻辑回归预测赛前胜率,并在比赛中通过 Confluent 消息队列流式计算带有时间衰减因子的动态胜率。 - `20:00` 美网 Match Chat 基于图结构智能体群与 Tool Use 架构,能在数秒内检索多源实时赛况并生成关键时刻解读,兼顾了新手与硬核球迷的画像需求。 - `22:36` Caliph 披露的微信 WeWorm 零点击漏洞表明,原本属于国家级顶尖黑客的技术能力正在被 AI 民主化,大幅拉低了高危渗透的门槛。 - `26:15` AI 挖掘非传统攻击面依赖极高算力成本;专家认为当前此类威胁本质上仍是资源与资本的竞争,其攻击逻辑受制于算力经济学约束。 ## Detailed walkthrough ### `00:00` 开场与 OpenAI 全新大模型 Astra 的震撼演示 本期节目由 Tim Hwang 担任主持,联合主持 David Zax(IBM Think 特约撰稿人)以及三位常驻嘉宾:Olivia Buzek(主任 AI 工程师)、Aaron Baughman(IBM Fellow)和 Bri Kopecki(AI 客户成功工程师)共同坐镇。节目聚焦本周人工智能领域的重磅动态:除了 IBM 在美网公开赛(US Open)的前沿应用,以及令人担忧的 WeWorm 网络安全漏洞外,核心焦点落在了 OpenAI 最新发布的旗舰大模型 Astra 及其在数学领域取得的突破性进展上。 David Zax 率先开启话题,介绍了 Astra 的现场演示环节。现在的 AI 产品发布会已经把这类实机互动做成了标配流程:演示人员走进专门的房间与模型实时交谈,其视听交互效果让人仿佛置身于一个未来感十足的“AI 洞穴”。在演示中,Astra 展现了令人咋舌的多模态操作能力——不仅能将二维图纸即时重构为精确的三维渲染模型,还能在同一时间无缝切换,替演示者在 Uber Eats 上点外卖并迅速送达。面对英伟达 CEO 宣称“这正是大家翘首以盼的通用人工智能(AGI)”的论调,David 向在场专家抛出疑问:Astra 真的跨过了 AGI 的门槛吗? - 本期核心话题涵盖:OpenAI 新模型 Astra 的发布与数学突破、WeWorm 安全利用程序威胁,以及 IBM 赋能美网公开赛的最新工具。 - David Zax 形容当前的交互体验为:“And mainly I walk away thinking I really want a big kind of AI cave to kind of talk to a model in this way.” ### `02:15` 算力成本质疑与 BenchCAD 上的工程突破 面对铺天盖地的惊叹,Olivia Buzek 提出了冷水般的审慎思考。她强调,在评估庞大新模型的能力时,必须审视其背后的计算开销与资源消耗:让模型接管计算机屏幕、执行点外卖等日常操作,究竟需要燃烧掉多少 Token?Olivia 认为,普通人完全可以写一个简单的脚本封装(harness),驱动更小、更低阶的模型替自己完成 DoorDash 点餐,根本不需要动用这种巨型大模型。人类必须反思自己是否只是盲目地把更大的模型砸向各种问题,而没有想清楚其真正的现实意义。关于这一担忧,Olivia Buzek 尖锐地指出:“And so I think what worries me the most is like, are we approaching problems the right way as humans, or are we simply throwing bigger and bigger models at problems without thinking through what the actual implications are.” Aaron Baughman 随后切入讨论,直言学术界和工业界至今仍未就 AGI 的真正定义达成共识。如果将 AGI 定义为一个能够自主理解未知目标、主动检索知识、制定规划并调用软件工具执行任务的系统,那么它在现实中可能并没有想象中那么遥不可及,甚至看起来就像一个能力极其出众的“数字员工”。然而,实现这种能力的代价令人咂舌:据称为了训练 Astra,耗费了整整 10 万套配备 NVLink 72 的英伟达 Blackwell 系统,其总耗电量堪比美国本土一整个大区的用电负荷。谈到模型测试时,Aaron 强调基准测试必须考验未曾见过的任务,而在全新的 BenchCAD 几何基准测试中,Astra 取得了令人瞩目的 95.9% 准确率,相比之下上一代 GPT-5.6 Sol 仅在 80% 刚出头的区间,Fable 模型的得分也相差无几。Aaron Baughman 总结道:“It's pretty neat that it can do those types of things, you know, and we're moving from, you know, being able to ask AI for answers to now asking AI to do work.” ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Astra 模型从 2D 图纸到 3D 几何建模的执行管线 accDescr: 展示 Astra 如何接收多视角 2D 图纸,理解环境并生成 CAD 代码,最终在 3D 空间比对几何结构 subgraph Input ["输入层"] A["多重视角 2D 渲染图纸"] end subgraph Engine ["Astra 推理与环境交互"] B["环境与空间拓扑感知"] C["生成可执行 CAD 代码"] end subgraph Verification ["验证与构建"] D["构建 3D 实体模型"] E["真实物理几何比对校验"] end A --> B B --> C C --> D D --> E ``` - 训练成本估算:动用了 100,000 套 Blackwell NVLink 72 系统,其能耗规模相当于美国大陆一个大行政区的电力需求。 - BenchCAD 基准准确率对比:Astra 达到 95.9%,而 GPT-5.6 Sol 与 Fable 均徘徊在 80% 略高的低位区间。 - 任务范式转变:模型不再仅限于“回答问题”,而是能直接理解多视角 2D 图纸、编写 CAD 程序并比对 3D 几何,真正“承担实际工作”。 ### `05:40` 商业落地的现实落差与 10,000 个 AI Agent 的协同演习 站在面向企业客户的第一线,Bri Kopecki 对这种超大规模模型的落地持实用主义看法。她坦言,在过去几周与现实客户打交道的过程中,从未见过哪家企业日常业务需要如此恐怖参数量的模型。绝大多数企业面临的核心痛点是执行效率、响应速度与系统可靠性,而不是“现场去解一个纳维-斯托克斯方程”。Bri 表示:“I haven't yet to see a use case where my customers would have needed a model of this magnitude.” 虽然她认可英伟达等硬件巨头不断突破算力极限的探索精神,但企业在落地时必须权衡每次操作烧掉的 Token 成本与实际产出效益。 针对数学难题的突破,Aaron Baughman 纠正了一个普遍的误区:外界以为这只是单个大模型灵光一现解出了纳维-斯托克斯方程,但实质上 OpenAI 是组织起了一支由 10,000 个 AI Agent 构成的协同“智能体蜂群”(swarm of agents)。这些智能体在一个总协调员的调度下分工协作,分成若干子智能体通过工具协议(如 MCP 服务器)获取外部工具,各自展开基于思维链(Chain of Thought)的大规模并行探索,最终拼接出完整的数学证明路径。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 10,000 个 AI Agent 协同解决复杂数学问题的架构 accDescr: 协调智能体向成千上万个子 Agent 分发探索任务,子 Agent 调用 MCP 协议工具并借助思维链并行求解 subgraph Coordinator ["总控层"] Coord["协调智能体 (Coordinator)"] end subgraph Swarm ["蜂群计算集群 (10,000 个子 Agent)"] A1["子智能体 A: 思维链假设验证"] A2["子智能体 B: 边界条件探索"] A3["子智能体 N: 约束方程求解"] end subgraph Tools ["工具环境"] MCP["MCP / 工具服务器"] Comp["外部符号计算与求解器"] end Coord --> A1 Coord --> A2 Coord --> A3 A1 <--> MCP A2 <--> MCP A3 <--> MCP MCP <--> Comp ``` - 商业实际诉求:企业级应用追求的是低延迟和确定性结果,通用业务并不依赖前沿数学求解级别的参数模型。 - 蜂群智能体架构:动用 10,000 个 Agent 并行作业,各子节点依赖工具协议和思维链推理共同完成宏大证明。 ### `07:34` 千禧年大奖难题:纳维-斯托克斯方程与背后的戏剧性较量 为了让非技术背景的听众理解这一事件的分量,David Zax 特意叫停了细枝末节的推演,拉回宏观视角梳理了背后的历史渊源与戏剧性内幕。2000 年,克雷数学研究所(Clay Mathematics Institute)设立了著名的“千禧年大奖难题”,钦点了七大堪称“现代数学奥林匹斯山”的世纪难题,并为每个难题的攻克悬赏 100 万美元。纳维-斯托克斯方程(Navier-Stokes equations)作为流体动力学的基石正是其中之一,此前已困扰物理学和数学界近 90 年之久,而这次 Astra 攻克的是流体动力学在平滑初始条件下速度发散的奇点问题。David 戏谑地将其比作“水自发爆炸问题”:即在极端约束变化下,原本平稳平滑流动的液体速度是否会无界飙升、最终打破平滑解。 然而,这一数学突破背后却充满了科技巨头之间争分夺秒的“肥皂剧”色彩。行业传言称,纽约大学(NYU)与 Anthropic 组成的人类数学家联合团队已经接近解决该方程,并且即将公开发表成果论文。OpenAI 闻讯后为抢占科学突破的先机,这才紧急调动了这支由 10,000 个 Agent 组成的庞大算力阵列,在极短时间内对该问题展开饱和式攻击。David Zax 讽刺性地指出,各方为了争夺这区区 100 万美元的奖金头衔,背后投入的算力成本恐怕高达数千万美元。随后 Aaron Baughman 确认了该问题的严峻性:人类摸索了近一个世纪,核心难点就在于寻找流体在初始平滑状态下何时会突破物理边界、其速度演化何时变得完全不受约束。 - 奖金与成本倒挂:克雷研究所的千禧年大奖悬赏金为 100 万美元,而 OpenAI 调动集群求解该问题消耗的算力开销据估算高达数千万美元。 - 难题历史跨度:纳维-斯托克斯方程的平滑解与奇点问题已困扰学界近 90 年,探索流体速度在何种严苛边界下会由平滑演化为无界发散(unbounded velocity)。 - 竞争白热化内幕:坊间传闻 OpenAI 动用智能体蜂群的直接诱因,是为了赶在 NYU 与 Anthropic 联合团队发表该难题的研究成果前抢先冲线。 ### `10:00` 纳维-斯托克斯方程求解中的人机协同与未来希望 对于 OpenAI 的 Astra 及其声称解决纳维-斯托克斯方程(Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness)的数学大模型突破,嘉宾们在开玩笑之余展开了严谨探讨。讨论从洗澡时的流体力学笑谈开始——由于该方程与流体运动直接相关,大家调侃现在终于可以去看看证明,搞清楚“洗澡到底安不安全”了。但回归现实,嘉宾们一致认为必须保持谨慎,等待数学界权威的同行评审与“基准真相(ground truth)”确认。数学界此时也掀起波澜,部分学者提出质疑或声称自己更早提出了解决方案,这些争议信号恰恰表明 AI 的解法已经非常接近真正的突破口。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Human-AI Collaboration in Navier-Stokes Proof accDescr: Diagram showing how human direction and multi-agent AI compute collaborated to solve and verify the Navier-Stokes proof. subgraph Phase1["人类战略决策"] A["人类确定核心命题"] --> B["算力投入千禧年七大难题"] end subgraph Phase2["AI 计算求解"] B --> C["Astra 解决某中间命题"] C --> D["人类决策:集中算力攻克纳维-斯托克斯"] D --> E["10,000 个智能体耗时 88 小时生成证明"] end subgraph Phase3["形式化验证"] E --> F["将数学证明转换为 Lean 代码"] F --> G["形式化系统耗时 17 小时验证完毕"] end ``` 谈及人与 AI 智能体(Agent)的协同机制,主持人和嘉宾指出,这次突破的关键并不是“AI 独自解决了问题”,而是“人类指导并管理 AI 解决了难题”。最初人类选定了这套重点,当 Astra 同时并行推演千禧年大奖难题(Millennium Prize Problems)并在某个中间命题取得进展后,人类研究员迅速做出决策,集中全部算力专攻纳维-斯托克斯方程。Brie Kopecki 对此深表认同,强调人类的直觉、创造力与协同不可或缺。她充满信心地说道:“Yeah, I think that I love how you're framing this because it shows to the world that regardless of how powerful AI has become and is becoming, it still requires human intellect, human creativity and human collaboration to get those answers to these huge problems.” 她认为,那些担心“下周就会因 AI 失业”的人大可不必恐慌,人类大脑在决定何为重要命题上依然占据核心主导地位。 除数学领域外,大家对这项技术的横向溢出效应尤为振奋。Brie 提到了医药健康与全球变暖等宏观议题,坚信未来借助 AI 和量子计算,攻克绝大多数癌症、终结致命疾病将不再遥不可及。 - **初始求解耗时**:约 10,000 个协作智能体耗时 88 小时推导出初始证明。 - **Lean 形式化验证**:研究团队将证明转换为形式化交互证明语言 Lean,仅耗时 17 小时即完成了自动化逻辑验证。 - **人类干预决策**:在推演全部千禧年难题的过程中,依靠人类的关键研判,将算力及时聚焦收敛到特定物理方程上。 --- ### `13:30` IBM 与美网公开赛的长期技术合作及全新 AI 赋能 话题从宏大的科学命题转向了竞技体育与即时应用。IBM 专家 Aaron Baughman 介绍了 IBM 与美国网球协会(USTA)的长期技术合作:这项始于 1992 年、持续了 30 多年的合作,旨在为全球超过 1400 万无法亲临现场的球迷提供深度的数字化赛事体验。 2024 年的美网中,IBM 将 AI 技术提升到了全新维度。Aaron 透露,团队不仅实现了赛前的赛果概率预测,还在比赛进行中逐点(point-by-point)进行实时追踪,精准捕捉改变比赛走势的“关键时刻(Key Moments)”。此外,系统为球迷构建了高度个性化的对话式交互体验,并且首次挑战了一项前沿难关——对运动员在发球等动作中的四肢与生物力学(Biomechanics)展开逐帧追踪与空间骨骼分析。 - **合作历史跨度**:IBM 与 USTA 的数字化合作已长达 30 余年(自 1992 年起)。 - **受众规模**:面向全球超过 1400 万网球迷,充当无法入场球迷的核心“第二屏幕(Second Screen)”。 - **技术突破方向**:涵盖赛前概率预测、逐点实时动态赔率、智能体驱动的关键时刻文本生成、Match Chat 对话助手以及针对发球动作的生物力学肢体追踪。 --- ### `15:40` 美网赛事全流程 AI 解密:从赛前预测、实时动态胜率到智能体赛况问答 Aaron 现场屏幕共享演示了 USOpen.org 网站的实时运作机制,以刚刚结束的洁西卡·佩古拉(Jessica Pegula)对阵艾玛·纳瓦罗(Emma Navarro)的比赛为例,详细拆解了幕后的 AI 架构。在赛前获胜概率(Pre-match Likelihood to Win)模块中,系统融合了媒体报道量、各要素情绪分析、历史交手数据(head-to-head stats)以及选手在不同场地(硬地、红土、草地)的胜率比。赛前模型由两大经典机器学习模型构成——XGBoost 决策树(XGBoost trees)与逻辑回归(Logistic Regression)。该系统赛前预测佩古拉有 77% 的概率获胜,最终佩古拉以 2-1 晋级,成功印证了预测;整个系统的赛前预测命中率长年保持在 60% 多的高水准。 ```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: US Open Real-time Match Analysis Architecture accDescr: Architectural pipeline of IBM's real-time match data processing, probability updates, and agentic text generation. subgraph Ingestion["数据输入与流转"] A["球场逐点数据 (Point Event)"] --> B["Confluent 消息队列"] end subgraph RealTimeCompute["实时概率计算"] B --> C["启动预设概率 (Bootstrap)"] C --> D["动量方程 (含时间衰减与情境增益)"] D --> E["Live Likelihood to Win"] end subgraph AgenticProcessing["智能体服务群"] B --> F["智能体交易市场 (Agentic Marketplace)"] F --> G{"判定是否为关键时刻?"} G -->|"是"| H["生成赛况文本与摘要"] G -->|"否"| I["跳过生成"] H --> J["Match Chat / 赛后 3D 复盘"] end ``` 比赛开始后,系统自动切换至实时获胜概率(Live Likelihood to Win)。这套系统以赛前概率为底数进行冷启动(bootstrap),随后在比赛中根据“包含衰减因子的动量方程(momentum equation with decays)”和比赛情境增益,在每个击球点产生胜负的瞬间重新计算胜率。所有现场击球事件通过 Confluent 消息流实时派发。与此同时,数据流被分发至后端的“智能体市场(Agentic Marketplace)”,智能体协同评估该击球是否属于影响局势的“关键时刻”;一旦触发阈值,系统便自动撰写生成文本解说,例如“佩古拉以精彩的 2-1 击败纳瓦罗锁定胜局”。 此外,球迷可以通过界面直接进入 3D 赛事回放以可视化选手跑位,也可以使用基于大语言模型的“Match Chat”功能。点击启动该功能后,后台会通过 Tool Use 检索 IBM 聚合的各类实时赛况数据源与数据流,将上下文拼装成 Prompt,随后调动后台相互竞争推理的 Graph 智能体网络,在数秒内为球迷提供精准、专业的赛事实时洞察与问答支持。 - **赛前机器学习底座**:结合 XGBoost 与 Logistic Regression,融合媒体情绪、声量及选手场地适应性数据。 - **实时概率引擎**:利用动量方程与动态衰减,针对每一次击球实时重算实时获胜几率。 - **流处理与内容生成**:依托 Confluent 消息骨干网连接智能体市场,自动化完成关键击球判定与新闻级解说文本生成。 - **多智能体竞速检索**:Match Chat 采用图类型智能体群(Graph-laying agents),多个智能体竞速处理工具调用(Tools)与数据检索,确保对话延迟达到秒级体验。 ### `20:00` 美国网球公开赛与 IBM AI:从用户画像到肢体追踪与发球质量分析 Aaron Baughman 介绍了 IBM 为美国网球公开赛(US Open)打造的 AI 体验。当被问及是什么样的球迷在实际使用这些工具时,Aaron 解释称,团队围绕不同的用户画像(user personas)构建了系统。例如“比赛聊天”(Match Chat)功能主要面向介于纯入门与硬核死忠之间的普通球迷——他们可能希望通过数据深入了解比赛并转化为铁杆球迷,也可能只是太忙,只想快速掌握表面信息并提出自己感兴趣的问题。系统还会分析用户登录和收藏球员的行为,将这些信息与聊天中提出的问题类型反向匹配,从而不断优化针对特定用户画像的服务。 随后,Aaron 演示了重磅的肢体追踪技术(limb tracking)。IBM 引入了“发球质量”(serve quality)评估系统,借助骨骼识别追踪球员身体上的 21 个关键点,采样率高达每秒 50 帧(50 fps)。在整届赛事中,这套系统累计处理了多达 12 亿个数据点,覆盖了全部 254 场单打比赛。系统将整个发球动作拆解为一系列严密的物理阶段(准备、蓄力引拍、击球加速、触球、减速与随挥),并设定规则来量化两大指标: - **有效性(Effectiveness)**:球是否精准落入特定的发球多边形区域。 - **效率(Efficiency)**:球员如何挥拍,动作结构是否合理高效。 这些数据直接喂给移动端主页与 Match Chat,为用户生成个性化的实时洞察。Aaron 强调这是业内首创的技术,未来还计划拓展到正反手等其他击球动作中。主持人盛赞这一工具,称每次 Aaron 登上《Mixture of Experts》(MOE)节目,都能看到 IBM 平台取得突飞猛进的演进。 ```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: IBM US Open Serve Quality Pipeline accDescr: Pipeline showing data capture, phase breakdown, and fan experiences. subgraph Capture["1. 数据采集与骨骼追踪"] A["50 fps 高速画面"] --> B["追踪 21 个身体关节点"] B --> C["全赛事 12 亿数据点<br/>(254场单打比赛)"] end subgraph Analysis["2. 动作阶段与质量评估"] C --> D["动作阶段分解<br/>(准备/引拍/击球/随挥)"] D --> E["有效性指标<br/>(落点多边形)"] D --> F["效率指标<br/>(挥拍动作规范度)"] end subgraph Delivery["3. 用户端呈现"] E & F --> G["Match Chat 智能问答"] E & F --> H["移动端个性化首页"] end ``` --- ### `22:36` Caliph 利用 AI 发现微信零点击漏洞:“WeWorm”蠕虫病毒引发的恐慌 主持人将话题转向了 AI 的“暗黑面”(dark side)——网络安全威胁。近日,网络安全初创公司 Caliph 利用 AI 技术在中国超级应用微信(WeChat)中发现了一个严重漏洞。微信在全球拥有超过 10 亿用户,几乎承载了人们的一切数字生活。然而,Caliph 不仅发现了缺陷,还借此构建出名为“WeWorm”的蠕虫型恶意代码,并实现了“零点击”(zero-click exploit)攻击能力。 在这种攻击场景下,病毒会潜入某个受害者的通讯录并向联系人发起 VoIP 视频或语音呼叫。接听方哪怕什么都不点、完全不进行任何操作,设备也会直接沦陷并被感染,随后病毒会以指数级速度向外裂变传播。该漏洞已于 7 月被发现,Caliph 遵循负责任披露原则通报给了腾讯(Tencent),微信随后修补了漏洞,数月之后该消息才被公之于众。 David Zax 坦言自己虽然不是技术人员,但深感恐慌。过去人们认为这种级别的零点击漏洞攻击通常只属于资金雄厚的顶级国家级黑客(state actors),但现在一家初创公司用 AI 就能自动化挖掘出来,这让人们开始思考“人类毁灭概率”(P-Doom)究竟该调高多少。曾在中国上海生活过两年的 Bri Kopecki 同样心有戚戚,她回忆道: > “我个人在上海生活的两年里用过微信,所以我非常熟悉这款应用。早在 2015 到 2016 年,我就用微信付房租了,它那时就已经如此先进。” Bri 指出,如今每个月都会冒出几起利用 AI 挖掘漏洞的重磅新闻。黑客事件本身固然严重,但更根本的问题在于 AI 极大地降低了攻击的技术门槛,让强大的渗透能力变得触手可及。 --- ### `26:15` 非传统攻击面、系统不完美性与 1500 万美元的算力经济学 讨论转向更深层次的技术本质。Caliph 在技术披露中提到,该缺陷源于微信 VoIP 协议栈中的内存破坏(memory corruption)问题,并指出这是诸多即时通讯软件中普遍存在的“非传统攻击面”(unconventional attack surfaces)。David 提问:为什么进入 AI 时代后,系统技术栈中那些不起眼的隐秘角落会突然暴露? Olivia Buzek 从哲学与系统工程的双重视角给出了解释。她借用日本的“残缺美”(Wabi-sabi,佗寂)打比方,指出人类创造的任何软件都不可能是完美无瑕的,总会存在各种粗糙边缘(rough edges)。AI 并不会凭空“自发行动”,它始终是在响应 Prompt。现在的变化在于,随着大模型能力的提升,过去需要极其详尽指令的安全测试,现在可能只需要一句宽泛的“去找漏洞吧”(go off and look for vulnerabilities),模型就能在深层代码库中自主巡检并展现出惊人的创造性行为。 然而,Olivia 强调这种看似无所不能的能力背后存在巨大的“现实经济学”(real world economics)门槛: > “在没有具体约束的情况下,人们输入给模型的 Prompt 所缺乏的精确性,最终都转化成了消耗的天文数字般的资源。” Olivia 列举了此前节目中讨论的 OpenAI 内部项目 Astra 解决纳维-斯托克斯(Navier-Stokes)千禧年数学大奖难题的案例——为了赢得 100 万美元的奖金,OpenAI 实际上烧掉了价值 1500 万美元的算力 Token,在经济学上极不合理。对于在微信这样复杂的应用上挖掘深层蠕虫漏洞,其算力开销同样极其昂贵: > “OpenAI 和 Anthropic 坐拥海量资源,以至于他们能以一种相对漫不经心的态度来运用这些能力。” Olivia 进一步总结道,大家不必过度陷入虚无的恐慌,因为真正的安全威胁不仅取决于技术本身,还取决于资源掌握在谁手里以及他们的动机为何:“只要你有 1500 万美元的算力可以挥霍,任何人都可以做到这一点。”而在大模型时代之前,如果你有 1500 万美元巨资,你同样可以雇佣顶尖的黑客团队攻破几乎任何系统。最终,主持人总结了本期节目在体育科技、抗癌希望与网络安全恐怖故事之间的碰撞,并向嘉宾致谢告别。 ## Notable quotes > `26:15` 在没有具体约束的情况下,人们输入给模型的 Prompt 所缺乏的精确性,最终都转化成了消耗的天文数字般的资源。 — Olivia Buzek ## Mentioned OpenAI, Astra, GPT-6, GPT-5.6 Sol, Fable, WeWorm, IBM, 美网公开赛 (US Open), Tim Hwang, David Zax, Olivia Buzek, Aaron Baughman, Bri Kopecki, NVIDIA, Blackwell, NVLink 72, BenchCAD, Uber Eats, DoorDash, 克雷数学研究所 (Clay Mathematics Institute), 千禧年大奖难题 (Millennium Prize Problems), 纳维-斯托克斯方程 (Navier-Stokes equations), Anthropic, 纽约大学 (NYU), Lean, 美国网球协会 (USTA), Confluent, XGBoost, Jessica Pegula, Emma Navarro, Match Chat, Caliph, 微信 (WeChat), 腾讯 (Tencent), VoIP, Mixture of Experts ## Video description Visit Mixture of Experts podcast page to get more AI content → https://www.ibm.com/think/podcasts/mixture-of-experts It's been a week that proves AI is moving faster than anyone can fully keep up with, unless you’ve got a good backhand. On episode 124 of Mixture of Experts, host Tim Hwang and co-host David Zax are joined by Bri Kopecki, Aaron Baughman, and Olivia Buzek to talk about new advances from OpenAI, new cybersecurity threats, and new tools for US Open fans from IBM. First, OpenAI... [Source](https://cdnapisec.kaltura.com/p/1773841/sp/177384100/playManifest/entryId/1_tvxm15e9/format/download/protocol/https/flavorParamIds/0/name/media.mp3)

Source quotes

[26:15] Olivia Buzek: 在没有具体约束的情况下,人们输入给模型的 Prompt 所缺乏的精确性,最终都转化成了消耗的天文数字般的资源。

Source quotes

[0:00] Olivia Buzek: And so I think what worries me the most is like, are we approaching problems the right way as humans, or are we simply throwing bigger and bigger models at problems without thinking through what the actual implications are. [26:45] Olivia Buzek: There have always been rough edges in everything that humans have ever created. It's actually one of the core beauties of being human is that the things that we create are not generally perfect objects.

Original transcript

[0:00] I haven't yet to see a use case where my customers would have needed a model of this magnitude. All that and more on today's mixture of experts. I'm Tim Huang and welcome to Mixture of Experts. Each week, MOE brings together a panel of brilliant brains working at the frontiers of artificial intelligence to lead you through the week's news. On this week's episode, we've got Olivia Buzek, staff AI engineer. Aaron Bahtman, IBM Fellow, and Brinko Pecky, AI Customer Success Engineer. And today my co-host is David Zax, staff writer for IBM Think. We're going to cover three big stories today. We're going to talk a little bit about IBM at the US Open. We'll talk about some worrying news about WeWorm. But I think I wanted to start today by talking a little bit about all of this news we're seeing coming out of OpenAI. There's a new model, some major advancements in mathematics, apparently. David, do you want to talk a little bit about this? Sure. So the model in question is Astra. It's the big new model from OpenAI. And if you've at a minimum seen the demo, these demos are becoming a staple of product announcements now. And often people go into a room and they begin talking with the model. And mainly I walk away thinking I really want a big kind of AI cave to kind of talk to a model in this way. video incredible developments in terms of how they can turn 2D renderings into 3D renderings and simultaneously order Uber Eats and get that delivered apparently instantaneously. So just before we turn to the mathematical side of things, I would just be curious to hear from our esteemed panel on what they are excited about in Astra, whether this, as the NVIDIA CEO has suggested, is truly the AGI that we've been waiting for, whether What do you think Olivia, for instance? So every time I look at things like this, like, you know, big new model coming out, I think a lot about the computational power that's going into it. So there is... Yes, maybe it can do those things, but I'm wondering just how many essentially tokens are being used when it's doing something like controlling your computer. Like, is this really like the way that it makes sense for agent models to act in the world? And I think there's a lot of kind of low hanging fruit that we have to do in terms of making agents actually accessible to the world. overly excited about, well, it can solve an arbitrary problem. I can also order DoorDash. I could probably write a harness to convince a lower tier model to order DoorDash for me. Like, in some ways, it's impressive. And in some ways, I just wonder if we're solving problems the right way. And so I think what worries me the most is like, are we... approaching problems the right way as humans, or are we simply throwing... bigger and bigger models at problems without thinking through what the actual implications are. So it's a cool demonstration. I just wonder whether it has the right real world implications. Aaron or Brie, have you either tried the models or seen, tried Astra or seen a use case that you think is really novel or can be performed more effectively by this model than other models? not. Because, I mean, first of all, I think that we need to understand in the community, there's no converged definition of what AGI really and truly is. If we define AGI as a system that can autonomously take a novel goal, it can understand the problem, it can even go out and get missing knowledge formally to set plan, use tools, software, execute work, and so on. Maybe that's AGI. But we may not even recognize when AGI has arrived. It just might look like a really good digital employee, you know, just like one of us doing work. But I do hope we're at the beginning of AGI because the reason is at what cost? I mean, if this number is right, you know, it took 100,000 Blackwell NVLink 72 systems just to train this model. Right. That's that's on the order of enough power for an entire region and the continental United States. Right. It's it's just. Unbelievable, right? How many resources it took. Now, the other point I wanted to make is that the real AGI test Should it be a benchmark, right? That's known. It should be a system or a goal that it hasn't seen before to see what happens. And what we're all looking at here is the BenchCAD benchmark. right? Astriga, an astounding 95.9% of the [5:00] accuracy level on it. And the next highest one, of course, is the GPT 5.6 sole, which is what in the lower 80s and Fable, roughly around the same place. So it did really good on that benchmark. And that benchmark is allowing the model to, So I think circling back, David, to your question, you know, one task that is really interesting is this one, right, is giving the model multiple TD views, right, and having it generate executable CAD code and understanding that environment, building a 3D object, comparing it with real geometry. It's pretty neat that it can do those types of things, you know, and we're moving from, you know, being able to ask AI for answers to now asking AI to do work. very customer centric. I haven't yet to see a use case or as of today or as of this, this or last week, where my customers would have needed a model of this magnitude. We need to solve the Navier Stokes right now. Yeah. And that's exactly the point. The things that we're solving on a day to day basis for, you know, for enterprises, it doesn't really require a model of that nature. faster yes and speed is very critical in an enterprise um setting. But I think I like what Olivia said, which we have to ask ourselves, what are we using this for? What problems are we really solving? But it's great that we have the capacity. So I think it's great we're pushing for those technological advances, be it computation, how many tokens are we burning? But then, of course, we have to ask ourselves, what are we solving? What is the most efficient way to do it? But I have yet to throw this into a use case. I'm sure it's probably going to be requested and I'm going to play around with it at some point. But it's exciting to see what's happening. I'm a huge NVIDIA fan. I think they have the power and they keep pushing their own boundaries just like most other companies these days. Yeah. One of the interesting aspects of the Navier Stokes area isn't that AI solved also that it used 10,000 AI agents to explore the problem, right? So it's this community of agents that work together with a coordinator, almost like sub agents that go out and respond and they can take an NCP server, get a tool, right? And run all these different explorations with chain of thought, right? But it's pretty cool, right? To see all of that work together, almost like a swarm of agents, right? That are now being unleashed on these. Maybe let's pause there just to, if you don't mind, Aaron, to zoom out and just make sure to speed on what we're talking about this navier stokes navier stokes i've seen it pronounced any number of ways um but it is this so-called millennium problem in mathematics it's uh in 2000 uh the clay institute um said these seven problems in mathematics are like the new mount olympus and mathematics we should all focus on them and if you win if you solve them we will pay you a million The second one was solved. It's called Navier-Stokes. It has to do with fluid dynamics. I don't understand it. I call it the exploding water problem because apparently they've proven that water can spontaneously explode, which sounds awesome. But basically, Astra solved it. There is some soap involved. There's kind of a soap opera because actually some humans at NYU slash Anthropic had maybe simultaneously solved it. because of a rumor that they were about to publish that OpenAI began to throw these 10,000 agents at the problem. Yeah, basically, Aaron, since you were kind of on this tack, do you want to tell us a little bit more about what the problem is, how it was solved, the amount of – I gather it was sort of tens of millions of dollars worth of compute was thrown at this problem to win a $1 million prize. But what else should we know about Navier Stokes before we get into the weeds on sort of how it was solved and maybe if we have time, the soap opera? Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, like you said, this is one of the seven millennium prize problems. 90 years. you know, so it's 90 years, almost a century, this has not been solved, right? And what it's looking for, you know, it's looking at, When it flew it, velocity becomes unbounded. even though the system starts very smoothly, so like exploding water, right? So it's very smooth and then you change the constraints and you figure out when does it become unbounded and, you know, the fluid velocity just change and moves and it's [10:00] It's like it becomes sublime and it just changes. Is it safe for me to take a shower is what I need to know. I would say it'd be interesting to take a shower. Safe? I don't know. Okay. It'd be a different kind of therapeutic shower. But now you have a proof that has been solved by Fable so that you can go look at and ask the question, is it safe to take a shower? So it's pretty neat. But I do think we need to be careful. accept it as the solution, right? And it's correct, right? So let's just wait and see what that ground truth actually is, you know. But I think the indicators, the litmus test, you know, it is looking pretty good, especially, you know, because other folks in the mathematics area are kind of up in arms. They say, wait a minute, we solved it first, right? So it seems as though the signals are there, that it's pretty close. Brie, you have great expertise in terms of interact with agents. And I think a huge part of the Navier Stokes story is about, it's not really that AI solved this problem, it's that humans managed AI to solve this problem. First of all, humans gave us the hunch of where to focus our energies. I gather that as Astra was churning on it, at a certain point, it solved an intermediate, they were cranking on all seven Millennium problems. At a certain point, Astra kind of solved an intermediate problem, then they decided, energy at solving Nivear Stokes specifically. So there are a lot of human decisions in the loop as this was cranking. So Brie, as you read through this story, what were you thinking about this as sort of a collaborative human AI effort? Yeah, I think that I love how you're framing this because it shows... to the world that regardless of how powerful AI has become and is becoming, it still requires human intellect, human creativity and human collaboration to get those answers to these huge problems. So I think that's a good thing. So for everyone who's watching and is scary, you're going to lose your job next week because of AI. I don't think that's... imminent. But we can have a different conversation about the future due to AI. But I think this is one thing we can learn from that. Humans, our human brains are still incredibly relevant. And also what we deem as important because the fact that this was thrown at Navier Stokes and not something else, that tells us we as humans say this is important and we need to throw compute at it. elicited excitement within me is Think about the... advancements we're going to make in health and medicine. If we can use this, and I am convinced we will be solving, we will be finding cures to probably all cancers. I think I was listening to this podcast. I forgot the expert who was on, but he said, we will not be dying from diseases because AI and quantum physics and everything that's going to help solve it. So, I mean, I think the initial solution took 88 hours and then they verified, and I'm leaning on to what Erin said, because I do believe they used another process where they translated the proof into lean, which is a, I believe, a mathematical, I'm not very familiar with the concept of lean, but that only took 17 hours to verify whether the results of those 10,000 agents is in fact correct and whether we can sure they're going to do additional verification around that, but I think this is incredibly exciting. This means we are a lot closer to cures and finding solutions to I mean, think about global warming and, you know, things that were problems we're facing on a very major scale. So those are my thoughts on the subject. Yeah, that's a good note and an optimistic one, which is good. We don't always hear that about AI. I'm going to move us on to our next topic. Longtime listeners to the show will know that when Aaron appears, we usually talk about sports. And so we're going to move very briefly from curing cancer and global warming to what IBM has been doing at the U.S. Open. Aaron, I believe you want to talk a little bit about the demo that you've been working on, right? Yeah, so for more than 30 years, right, so this has almost been since 1992, IBM and the USTA, we've partnered together to transform the [15:00] digital experiences of the US Open. So it's about bringing the tournament's data insights to the more than 14 million fans around the world. And just a fraction of them can actually attend. But This year, what we did is we took the partnership to another level by using AI, right? So some of these techniques that we are talking about, and I'll show you, what we did is we predicted matches before they even started, right? We would understand what's happening like point by point, identifying the moments that change the match as the match is being played. And then we also created a conversational and personalized experience for every fan. folding. And then for the first time, which is really, really neat, it was one of those grand challenges that we took up, but we went all the way down and we traced and tracked limbs, right, for athletes, biomechanics, and particularly on their serve, right? And so what I wanted to do is to just attempt to show you some of these demos that I have. So what you're looking at on my screen, If you go to it and it's live right now, the tournament is going on. It'll end this upcoming Sunday. But if you go to USOpen.org, and then if you go to like the scores here, you know, you can begin to see, you know, who's winning, who's who's doing what. And what I did is I picked the Pagula match that just ended against Navarro. Right. And. If I start at the top, so let's look at the preview. So here is our pre-match likelihood to win. So what happens is we have the system that ranks all of the players. We have three max forecasters that attempt to say what the volume of the media is being written about them. what the sentiment of different factors are. And then we also look at their head-to-head stats, if they have any. And then we also take into account different ratios. How are the players playing on each of the different surfaces, whether it's hard, clay, grass. But But in essence, there's two... classical machine learning models, right? So you have HB bootstries there and logistic regression as the other, right? And they help predict who's supposed to win pre-match, right? And here, you know, we got it right, where Bagula was supposed to win by 77%, and she did, right? It turns out, you know, that our odds are pretty good. I mean, we end up, you know, in the, I would say in the 60s, you know, with respect to predicting the right pre-match, right? And then as I scroll down, I can see all the different stats that did happen, right? That just helps to give us the explainability. Now, if I want to look here, Right. This is the replay. I can go in 3D. Right. And and then visualize and see how they're playing. But before I do that, I want to show you the summary of the match. So match chat is a place where I can go and ask questions during or after the match so I can better understand what's what's happened. And then we have our life likelihood to win. Right. So it's bootstrapped and started out with our pre-match likelihood to win. momentum equation with different decays that change it. And then we also have different boosters based on the situation at hand. But it moves the probability that somebody's going to win as every single point is made. So this is a real-time system. So as every single point is hit, won or lost, We get the message and then we compute. you know, the odds. And then at the same time, after we do that, we then send other messages over Confluent. And we have a agentic marketplace that then takes the data and it measures whether or not this was a key moment. And if it was, then we want to produce text. And here, this one is the very end key moment. But you can see the Pagula closes out a brilliant two to one victory over Navarro. all the key moments of the match so I can better understand it. And it's pretty cool. It's like a second screen experience. You can watch this, right, as the match is actually going on. Now going back to match chat, if I want to know what happened to the match, let's just push this button here. accept the terms, right? And then what's happening is this is exploring match chat. So it opens up another experience and this comes and it queries through tools, the data sources and feeds that we have, right? And we create a prompt that has a context, right? And then it goes through, right? And it goes through this myriad of graph laying type agents that three of them race, right? One and then another is... [20:00] uses a data synthesizer just because of the load scale that we have. If I want to see, you know, match details, then I can do that as well. Aaron, one question for you is I'm curious if you guys have information on what types of fans are using this type kind of experience. Um, cause I, I feel like, um, in my family, I've got kind of like two kinds of fans represented. One of them just likes to tune in and watch the ball go back and forth. Yeah. Uh, I have another one who is just really would love something like this really is intense about the data. Um, just kind of curious about what you're learning about usage. Um, yeah, so, so we do, right. Um, we have different user personas that we create these experiences for, um, what, you know, what I showed you like match chat is, is for, you know, sort of the middle of the road. hardcore fan or the novice, but it's someone sort of in the middle, right? And maybe that fan wants to become or see the data to transition them into a hardcore fan. Or alternatively, maybe they're just too busy and they just want to see surface level and they can ask any questions that they want. But we do collect analytics and people do sign in and favorite players, right? And we're able to take that information and actually trace it back into types of questions of match chat to of personas that are using the system. So what you're looking at here, this is limb tracking. So we introduced serve quality and we used IBM's Bob to build it. But what we do is we track 21 points across a player's body at 50 frames per second. So that turns out that over the course of the tournament, we're processing 1.2 billion data points and apply this to all 254 singles play, you can see the server hitting the ball. And we're measuring effectiveness, whether or not the ball goes into this polygon, and the efficiency or how they're swinging the racket. And we've broken up the serve into phases. So we have, you know, the start phase, a loading phase, caulking, you know, whenever you get the racket up and you have to hit the ball. acceleration when the racket's going down to contact to deacceleration to finish and follow through and we've broken out those phases and we apply rules to help us help us measure that and in In the Match Chat experience, you can ask questions about the Asserve quality. And then on your mobile device, when you go to the homepage, we have this live experience that's personalized to you. And we show the Asserve quality and some insights around it. So it's pretty neat. And it's a first of a kind. And I'm really excited about expanding this to other types of shots. Nice. This is great, Aaron. Why I love having you on the show because it feels like every time you come in, the platform is advancing as we go. And we get to watch it together here on MOE. which is really cool. Well, great. I'm going to move us on to our sort of final topic of today. You know, I think we've covered sports. We've covered curing cancer. And I think we're going to talk a little bit about the dark side for our final segment. Really interesting story, David, today that I think just broke over the last few days about the use of AI to generate viruses in effect. A thing called WeWorm that a lot of people have been worrying about. the shower. Now I'm really terrified of my phone because essentially this security startup called Caliph used AI to discover a bug in WeChat, which is the very popular Chinese messaging/everything app. Over a billion people use it. in China. But this US-based firm found this bug using their AI. And it's worse than a bug. What they were able to develop against this sort of vulnerability is a so-called worm. And not only that, but a zero-click exploit where essentially this virus can worm its way into one person's The recipients of that call don't need to do anything, and yet they are now infected, and it just can, in theory, grow exponentially. Now, this exploit was discovered in July. Of course, a caliph did the right thing. They went to the folks at Tencent, which makes WeChat. They alerted them to the vulnerability. The vulnerability was patched. Only now, months later, is the news story breaking. am personally I'm not a technical person but I'm terrified because this would seem like um an exploit on the level of what we are more familiar [25:00] from really sophisticated state actors. But it would seem that the rate at which AI is accelerating the discovery of bugs, the generation of exploits of these bugs, where should my P-Doom be at this point? I think you have a reason to be concerned. I think... Okay. a private consumer of AI, you know, as the end user, you know, we have, we interact with these tools. I personally have used WeChat during the two years I lived in Shanghai. So I'm very familiar with the app. I paid my rent using WeChat. That's how advanced it was back then in 2015 to 16 in of this, what we're discussing, is always part of the discussion. So, I mean, I wouldn't lose sleep over it, but it is definitely something we're seeing more and more. Every single month, I believe there's at least one major story about something like this and several smaller ones. I think the key takeaway here is that AI... Did it make the hacking more powerful? I mean, a hacking case is always... significant event, it made it more accessible. So this is going to continue to happen. And I look to our security experts, which I am not one, to solve these issues around it. It's definitely a concern. A question I want to put to Olivia, since it's a little technical, I gather that we don't know exactly what the exploit was. Califf wrote that the bug is a memory corruption issue in WeChat's a VOIP stack. And they also wrote something that this bug is an instance of the many unconventional attack surfaces that are present across many messaging apps. The other thing I noticed in their timeline is they said something like, "Our AI discovered the bug," and it's unclear to what extent they were just sort of letting the AI roam through various apps to find vulnerabilities. But it would seem to me that, and Bri is sort of pointing to this, that The advent of AI, the AI era that we're living in is exposing vulnerabilities in places we didn't quite suspect them, right? These so-called unconventional attack surfaces. Can you help explicate that a little bit to us here? Like, what is, why are new corners of technology stacks suddenly discovered to be vulnerable in the AI era? Sure. So, and I've talked a little bit about this the last couple of times we've had, like, big math problems getting solved by AI. So I think the way that I look at this, it's important to remember that we live in a dynamic system and an emergent system. There have always been rough edges in everything that humans have ever created. It's actually one of the core beauties of being human is that the things that we create are not generally perfect objects. There's like entire... lines of art, basically, about that fact, right? There's things like, you know, wabi-sabi, where we put pottery back together and try to create a hole and things like that. There's a lot of imperfections. I know that sounds really philosophical, but what I want to bring that back to is all software does definitely have vulnerabilities of some kind. Some of them require more advanced things to take advantage of them, and others of them have very simple holes in them. But it's actually near impossible to build perfect software. So we can very much say that that's probably what's happening. But then I want us to take a look at these models. There has not been a case yet that I have seen where models are truly acting on their own. It is always in response to a prompt, and it's really important to remember that basically, you know, Models do not have the capacity to act on their own. They are responding to text of some sort of prompt. Granted, as these models increase in their capacity, they're able to do more creative behavior in response to simpler and simpler prompts. of vulnerability and that type of vulnerability and this other type of vulnerability may be as simple now as go off and look for vulnerabilities. But... that lack of specificity that people are putting into their prompts now is coming [30:00] to them in the form of just the sheer amount of resources used. And so, yes, we, you know, we can see things like this, but unlike with the, you know, The Astra bit that we saw here, OpenAI's Astra solving the Navier-Stokes problem, where they've actually reported the number of tokens that it required. And I think, as we've said, it took some $15 million worth of compute in order to solve a $1 million problem. Obviously, the economics of that just get weird at that point. But anyways, the point is it took a lot, right? data, or at least I haven't seen any for this. What does it take to break into WeChat, right? Take it to take advantage of these more complex worms. And my guess is the number is similarly quite high. So I think there is these real world economics that there are, I think, essentially, and something I think we all have to kind of confront is OpenAI and Anthropic are behaving with so many resources available to them that they are able to apply these kinds of things relatively casually. And you can tell that it's casual, right? The way that they talk about it, it's like, oh, yeah, we just decided to go solve the Millennium Stokes problems. I'm not allowed to go spend $15 million of tokens because I feel like solving the Millennium Prize problem. Yeah, I couldn't do that. Like, even though I have access to these models, I can't go create worms, right? And so I think what we have to think about in this space is, yes, things have changed, right? resources. So personally, my fear is a little bit proportional to who holds those resources and what their priorities are. So anyone can do this so long as they have $15 million worth of compute to burn. Right, right. Which like, yes, no big deal. That's still a problem. But like in the era before, like cybersecurity was still an issue. If you had $15 million to pay a hacker, on now. Thank you very much. Yeah, exactly. Wow. This is always a great panel to have on MOE. We get a dose of hope, a dose of terror, a dose of grounded technical information. So Brie, Aaron, Olivia, great to have you on the show. And David was great co-hosting you. And thanks for joining all you listeners. If you enjoyed what you heard, you can get us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and podcast platforms everywhere. And we'll see you all next week on Mixture of Experts. *music*