Comment by SpicyLemonZest

> I thought Navier-Stokes (and some of the other millenium prize problems) actually had implications for useful technology.

This is the core misunderstanding that the open letter is attempting to correct.

Developing a better understanding of the Navier-Stokes equations could have a number of implications for useful technology. They're fundamental to fluid dynamics, and turbulence in particular is something that many people feel we could work with more effectively if we better understood how and why it's generated. The Navier-Stokes smoothness problem is an interesting and long-standing benchmark for this understanding; we don't know why it should be so hard to answer, so we hoped that the process of developing a proof to the problem would produce more understanding. (We may still be able to extract this understanding after the fact, if OpenAI's proof is fully human-comprehensible.)

Simply knowing that there exists a finite-time blowup is not practically useful. We know that fluids in the real world don't produce random singularities, so the result can't really have much physical meaning. What it illustrates is that the Navier-Stokes equations fail to model physical fluids in some yet to be characterized way.