Tech Brew Ride Home - Did AI Just Solve Math?

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

Bloomberg detailed Apple's decade-long path to a $2,000+ foldable iPhone, Gamers Nexus alleged LG smart TVs eavesdropped via built-in microphones and tracked nearby devices, and a mathematician accused OpenAI of secretly using his private Navier-Stokes work, which OpenAI denied. A look at Apple's path to a foldable device, the biggest change in iPhone history; sources: memory shortages led Apple to blow past an early $1,999 price goal (Bloomberg) Analysis of LG's smart TVs shows its ad software tracks nearby devices, security flaws can allow hackers to eavesdrop via the built-in microphone, and more (Gamers Nexus / YouTube) The Register reports LG's TVs generated audio transcripts even in standby, collected Wi-Fi network data and unpaired nearby devices, and fed it to LG's ad unit, which claims reach across 363 million addressable devices (The Register) Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster alleges OpenAI learned of his work with Anthropic's Levent Alpöge on Navier-Stokes and used an internal model to solve it (Scientific American) Subscribe to the ad-free feed.

Welcome to the Tech Brew ride home for Tuesday, September 8th, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. Bloomberg detailed Apple's decades-long path to a foldable iPhone. Gamer's Nexus alleges LG Smart TVs are eavesdropping on you and a mathematician accused OpenAI of secretly using his private Navier-Skote's work, which OpenAI denies. But also, is this the biggest day in all of mathematics? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. If you're anything like me, you're tracking every metric you're aware of a little.

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My wife can be whatever temperature she wants on her side of the bed as well. Use code ride home at 8Sleep.com slash ride home for up to $350 off the pod five. That's code ride home at 8Sleep.com slash ride home. Well, thank you all for notifying me overnight that the Apple event is tomorrow. not today, but look, they're always on a Tuesday. I just assumed, I guess it's like when you order something and you get told it'll be arriving a day later than you expect it because Monday was a holiday. Who knew Apple shifted similarly for holidays, right? But what do we expect Apple to announce tomorrow? Well, their first foldable phone, of course. So from our buddy Mark German,

the whole story about how Apple arrived finally at a foldable iPhone. Turns out, this might be the last bit of Tim Cook's product legacy at Apple. Quote, around 2020, Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook returned from a trip to Asia, unusually energized about a new product category, foldable phones. During visits to China and elsewhere in the region, the executive saw growing numbers of consumers using folding devices from Samsung, Huawei, and other smartphone makers. He came back convinced that Apple needed one of its own

and pushed the company to accelerate its efforts in what was still a nascent market. As it happened, Apple's secretive core technology development teams within the hardware engineering organization had already been studying foldable phones, displays, and related components for years. That effort dated back to well before Samsung put the category on the map with the first Galaxy Fold in 2019, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Cook's level of involvement was notable. Throughout his tenure as CEO, Cook was best known for focusing on Apple's finances and supply chain. He participated in product demonstrations and major decisions, but generally stayed away from the conception of new products. Cook and John Ternis later emerged as the product's biggest

champions, with the latter, quote, using his power to push it over the finish line, according to a person with knowledge of the device. Arriving at this point, though, was far from a sure thing. Early in development, the company targeted price of $1,99, seeking to come in just under the potential potentially controversial $2,000 barrier. Apple used a similar approach with the iPhone 10 in 2017 when it charged $999 just under $1,000 for what was then its most premium model. More recently, Apple has discussed pricing the foldable product as high as $2199, according to people involved in the matter who said various options have been considered in recent weeks and that the memory shortage has led Apple to blow past its cost goals. Some of the larger storage configurations of the

device could approach $3,000. The recently launched Apple upgrade subscription program, which works similarly to a leasing service, should help with sticker shock, along with aggressive trade-in promotions and installment plans from wireless carriers. Even with those drawbacks, Apple employees believe the company will sell every foldable phone it can produce. Wall Street estimates point to sales of about 7 to 10 million units this year. Early on, Apple's hardware teams prioritize four main challenges, reducing the visibility of the crease that marred many early foldable phones, improving the reliability of the hinge, creating a new type of flexible cover glass for the display, and developing camera technology that could place more components

behind the screen itself to maximize usable display area. Apple ultimately landed on an advanced titanium and aluminum hinge system paired with custom cover glass developed alongside partner Corning. That combination creates a crease that is far less visible than on currently shipping foldable, something Apple plans to highlight as a major competitive advance. While the device may be less durable than the iPhone 18 Pro line and other recent models, Apple believes its construction quality is industry-leading for the foldable market. It also believes it has a leg-up in software over the more fragmented Android ecosystem. The company recently tasked its software engineers with upgrading many of Apple's apps to

work better with the wide display. It's also tweaking the iOS operating system so apps can run better on a more diverse range of screen sizes. The biggest challenge was making the phone compelling enough to offset its inherent compromises. Around 2023, Apple Design Studios settled on the short and wide approach, believing it would provide a meaningful point of differentiation and create enough excitement for consumers to look past the deficiencies. Apple also needed some of the core technologies to reach the point where they were functional

enough to use. That combination coming together finally convinced Apple that the concept made sense, end quote. We've heard this before a couple of times, but maybe this is the most damning allegation yet. Is your LG smart TV spying on you? Quoting the register. The latest concerns center on smart TVs that researchers claim continued capturing audio after voice recognition was activated, including while the display was in standby. The claims once again come from the gamers Nexus YouTube channel,

which also claimed in July that LG's monitors were surreptitiously installing adware using an automatic Windows process. After inspecting the TV's network traffic and internal data, editor-in-chief Stefan Burke said the team found plain text transcripts generated from audio captured by the TV along with other information. The Gamer's Nexus crew said it observed the TV collecting IP addresses, location data, and the names, signal strengths, and channel numbers of nearby Wi-Fi networks. The TV also enumerated devices on the local network that were not paired with it, including smartphones, watches, routers, thermostats, airplanes, purifiers, server-based management controllers and PCs.

Burke added that the Wireshark packet capture analysis revealed such a large quantity of private data that it couldn't be displayed in the video and that this was all native behavior from LG's equipment. He said the findings represented an egregious invasion of privacy. Burke and the company also claimed that the TVs could continue capturing audio while disconnected from the internet, store it locally, and transmit the related data after connectivity was restored. LG does not hide the fact that its hardware incorporates technology from its advertising business,

LG ads solutions. In 2022, it announced that automatic content recognition ACR technology previously limited to its US smart TVs would be deployed in sets sold across 27 countries with the resulting insights available through its advertising business. LG said the ACR data was anonymized and handled in accordance with privacy regulations. Its advertising customers could use the resulting insights to measure campaign effectiveness and whether an ad led to registrations from an app or service. LG is not alone in this.

Most major smart TV manufacturers deploy some form of ACR in their hardware, although the controls available to use vary by vendor. The source of so much frustration, however, is that manufacturers are not forthcoming with consumers at the point of purchase about the extent to which their data is collected or how. Generating audio transcripts while the display is in standby is not something LG highlights in its product descriptions or marketing materials. According to Gamer's Nexus, however, that is what its testing uncovered. Instead,

the company's website described its TV voice features using terms such as intelligent voice recognition and Clear Voice Pro. Gamer's Nexus claims LG sends all the data its hardware collects to the ads unit, which claims in its marketing materials that customers can own the living room, having their ads appear on devices inside the connected LG household. LG Ad Solutions official fact sheet, which predictably requires you to enter your personal and contact details to access, states that there are 49 million LG TVs in the U.S. powered by its WebOS, but the company's total reach extends to 363 million addressable secondary devices. To potential customers, it promises precision targeting at the device level across households. ACR and other data collection technologies

have become commonplace across the smart TV market. Research suggests that many consumers are willing to trade their data for tangible financial savings, but the privacy implications are compounded when you consider these devices can be found mounted in boardrooms and doctor's offices. The allegations come less than two months after Gamer's Nexus reported that connecting certain LG monitors to an online Windows 11 PC could trigger installation of the LG Monitor app through Windows device metadata system. The behavior dependent on the user selecting recommended settings during Windows setup and being signed into the Microsoft Store.

As we reported at the time, the LG Monitor app installer has limited utility and displayed pop-up promotions for Macafee. LG told us at the time, quote, LG Electronics reiterates that McAfee is not installed automatically and is never installed without the user's explicit consent, end quote. Cyber threats can pop up where you least expect them to, like when you're focusing on today's threats, while AI is changing the entire landscape of cybersecurity right under your nose. Rubrik can help prepare your organization to handle this new world of cybersecurity With Rubrik, you get one platform that secures your data, controls your AI, and protects your identity.

Learn more at rubric.com slash mb. That's rubrik.com slash mb. Is your multi-entity management creating more confusion than clarity you need the Intuit ERP, Intuit Enterprise Suite? It's the AI native ERP solution that's powerful, painless, and proven. Learn more at Intuit.com slash ERP. Okay, here's a really weird brouhaha that erupted just this afternoon. First, OpenAI claimed an internal model significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra, solved something called the Navier-Stokes Problem, using 10,000 concurrent agents working for 88 hours.

Then, mathematician Tritian Buckmaster alleged that Open AI learned of his work with Anthropics, Levant Alpoje, on the same Navier-Stokes thingy, and that they used the internal model to solve it to sort of, I don't know, front-end them or something, quoting Scientific American. Today may go down as the biggest day in math in at least two decades, if not far longer.

In a development that crystallizes an existential shift in humankind's oldest intellectual discipline, artificial intelligence has reportedly solved one of the six open million-dollar problems in mathematics. The achievement proves that, The equations that govern the motion of fluids are fundamentally flawed. This is a deep blue Kasparov moment, wrote mathematician Tristan Buckmaster, referring to the sea change and thinking about machine intelligence that occurred when a supercomputer beat world champion

Gary Kasparov at chess in the 1990s and a statement released on Monday. The community needs to have serious and unhurried discussion about where to go from here. But, according to Buckmaster, the proof's origins may be murkier than they seem. In the same statement, he wrote that he and Levant Alpoje, a mathematician and an anthropic employee, made significant progress toward the problem last month. But before the pair could publish, Buckmaster alleged in the statement, rumors of their method reached OpenAI, where researchers there use the company's large language model to finish the job with a single prompt. The prompt, quote, had been sent in the past few days after information about our work had reached Open AI, Buckmaster alleged. The mathematical problem concerns the Navier-Stokes equation, which governs the flow of fluids, from the whirlpool circulating your bathtub's drain to the turbulent winds El Nino hurls across the North American continent.

After two centuries of study, mathematicians haven't been able to figure out whether these equations perfectly describe reality in every situation, or if they sometimes admit aberrant mathematical blips that could never happen in a real fluid. Answering this quandary has been viewed as so far beyond the reach of existing mathematics that the Clay Mathematics Institute has offered $1 million to anyone who does it. Over the past few years, two mathematicians Diego Cordoba and Luis Martinez, Zerora, worked out a potential trick to break the equations or blow them up, as such an achievement is described in math. They called the method forcing. It focuses on a part of the equations, as written in the clay problem,

that mathematicians previously deemed inconsequential. fact, most experts typically write the problem without this term, assuming that any blowup should be the same with or without it. But Cordova and Martinez-Zorora realized that there might be a way to break the equations solely by using this often overlooked piece. About a year ago, Buckmaster took up the Cordova and Martinez-Zorra approach, working with AlpoJ and using LLMs from OpenAI's rival company Anthropic to parse through the mathematical possibilities. Progress This was slow, according to Buckmaster's statement, until August 15th when he and Alpoje used the method to prove that the Navier-Stokes equations simpler, frictionless cousins, the Euler

equations, did in fact blow up. This finding on its own is a monumental mathematical achievement that is worthy of any award in math and a key step towards solving the Navier-Stokes problem. Buckmaster and AppleJ were able to verify that the proof was correct using the programming language lean, but the English language explanation the LLMs produced was barely readable, according to Buckmaster. The pair started trying to make sense of the mathematical steps one by one and wrote them in a way other researchers would be able to digest. According to Buckmaster, rumors of their work reached OpenAI at some point in the past week, and the company apparently had a team that was already working on the problem. But after becoming aware of the pair's work,

he alleged, Open AI focused its attention on forcing the often ignored piece of the clay problem in a major effort over last weekend, the Open AI team apparently used an internal model to take the result. Further, blowing up the full Navier-Stokes equations, according to Buckmaster. Buckmaster wrote in his statement that he spoke on the phone on Sunday with Sebastian Bubeck, who leads Open-A-I's math team and another unnamed Open-AI employee. Buckmaster alleged that the call became contentious with Open-A-I offering him sole authorship of the Navier-Stokes result in a paper that would acknowledge that the company's internal model had solved it. Bubeck allegedly wanted to exclude AlpoJ, an employee of Open AIs competitor, according to Buckmaster,

he asserted that he threatened to inform the media and alleged that the reply was, why would you ruin your career, according to the statement. At 11.58 p.m. Eastern daylight time on Monday, Buckmaster posted his and AlpoJ's results, along with the statement, laying out his account of events. According to the statement, he does not know how the Open AI team so quickly reconstructed the details of its approach. Buckmaster wrote that he asked Bucbuck. Bubek if the OpenAI LLM was given access to his personal prompts to the company's model codex,

which he and Alplejay were using throughout the process and thought were private. Bubek told him no, but wouldn't answer whether the model's training involved user data, which might have included Buckmaster and Alplegy's private prompts, Buckmaster alleged. Beyond the jockeying, for credit among the AI vanguard and the implications for the future of mathematics as a human vocation, there is a mathematical issue. The so-called clay problem, as written, is solved, but the clay problem, as many experts imagine it, lacks the piece that the forcing method relies on. Moreover, because this element is so crucial to the method, it is not clear whether there's any way to extend the proof

to blow up the Navier-Stokes equation without it. Some in the community might say that the problem hasn't really been solved or that this has only been achieved through a loophole. That leaves the Clay Institute a f—and the field of mathematics and a bit of a quandary. In any case, Buckmaster is emphatic that the key ideas be credited to Martinez-Zerora and Cordoba. I believe Louise Martinez-Zorora deserves a Fields Medal, he wrote in his statement. Ultimately, math may never be the same. AI companies have fixated on using their technology to solve math problems for more than a year. Because the field's focus on objectivity aligns with these companies' goal of developing superhuman intelligence,

they've been pushing their models to do math that no human can faster than any human can. It appears they have succeeded. There's a far bigger story here than the one in my statement, the sheer magnitude of what frontier models can now do and what that means for us all, Buckmaster wrote on Mastodon, a little before 6 a.m. Eastern time on Tuesday. I hope the labs can see this and set the petty posturing aside, end quote. In a press briefing, opening eye, denied that its researchers or models

saw the Buckmaster or Alplej prompts says it spent millions in compute only after hearing Anthropic had a breakthrough. Okay, tomorrow's show will be a bit late. iPhone event, of course. Talk to you then.