On Monday, OpenAI announced a new independent advisory group hosted at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Called The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, the group is meant to give mathematicians more input into the company’s math-oriented research.

“This group will serve as a bridge to the mathematical community and broader public, giving mathematicians a voice in how we move forward,” the post reads.

The announcement comes after the abrupt publication of a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem. As part of the announcement of the new group, OpenAI also claims that the same internal model has resolved more than 100 additional open problems across most areas of mathematics.

Many prominent mathematicians have taken issue with the frenzied pace of those results. Earlier this month, twenty-five Fields Medal-winning mathematicians signed an open letter arguing that AI labs are threatening their intellectual work as they seek to one-up each other with solutions to famous math problems.

True to its name, OpenAI’s new group will mostly serve in an advisory capacity, assessing the significance of new results and coordinating their release. While members won’t be paid, they can offer unsolicited advice, can go public with their views, and control their own membership, giving them a measure of independence from the company.

However, the group won’t be given leeway to slow down or redirect OpenAI’s ongoing mathematical research. As the blog post puts it, “the group will not be responsible for advising us on how to pace our internal progress on mathematics.”

The Institute for Advanced Study emphasized this point in its own announcement. “Although we will give advice, we do not have decision making power at any AI company, and the responsibility for the decisions made by any company will rest with that company,” said the institute in a press release.

Nine prominent mathematicians have been named as initial members of the group. Notably, only one of the members — IAS’s Camillo de Lellis — also signed the Fields Medalists’ letter.

With five days left to save up to $200 on your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 pass, our countdown of the five reasons to join 10,000+ founders, investors, and operators at San Francisco’s Moscone West, October 13-15, continues.

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Reason no. one: Discovery

Part of the value of Disrupt has always been finding breakouts early. The startup you haven’t heard of yet. The technology moving from experiment to real product. The founder attacking a problem in a way you hadn’t considered. Or an emerging category that suddenly looks much bigger once you see several companies building around it.

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See where investors are placing their bets

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At Disrupt, all 200 Startup Battlefield startups exhibit, so you can go beyond the company description. Meet the founders. See the product. Ask why they’re building it. Find out who they’re building it for. Understand what they think the rest of the market is missing.

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Sometimes discovery is about finding a company. Sometimes it’s about spotting the pattern behind several of them.

Then watch 20 startups put their ideas to the test on the global stage

From the top 200, 20 companies will take the Disrupt Stage to pitch live in front of leading investors and the TechCrunch community. One will ultimately take home the Disrupt Cup and $100,000 in equity-free funding. Explore all the Startup Battlefield on-stage sessions on the Disrupt agenda.

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Startup Battlefield alumni include companies that went on to become familiar names across the technology industry, including Dropbox, Discord, Cloudflare, Fitbit, Mint, and Trello, with a collective total fundraising of $32B since this program started.

Nobody knows which members of the 2026 class will follow that path. Discovery is most valuable before the answer is obvious.

Meet these 200 hand-picked startups. Talk to companies outside your usual sector. Watch the finalists pitch on the Disrupt Stage. Look for the technologies, business models, and problems that keep appearing.

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Kairos Power has picked engineering firm Samsung C&T to help build its 50 megawatt demonstration reactor for Google, which the nuclear startup is aiming to have completed by 2030.

As part of the deal, Samsung C&T will make an equity investment in Kairos and provide “in-kind” engineering services, the combination of which is worth up to $100 million, Kairos Power said Monday. The equity investment will make up $70 million of the total, a Kairos spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Samsung C&T has built or helped build about a dozen nuclear reactors around the globe.

Kairos is part of a wave of nuclear startups that have benefited from the surge in power demand from AI data centers. Google first signed a deal with the company in fall 2024, calling on Kairos to build nuclear reactors capable of generating about half a gigawatt of electricity by 2035. 

Currently, Kairos is building two reactors in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The first, Hermes 1, is a low-power demonstrator that will help the company refine its commercial design. The second, Hermes 2, is Kairos’s first commercial-scale reactor. Output from Hermes will count as the first 50 megawatts of its deal with Google.

The startup received approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build the reactors in November 2024. It expects Hermes 2 to begin operating in 2030, in line with its original agreement with Google.

Hermes 2 will be a fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor, a design that has been floated for years but never built at commercial scale. Fluoride salts have high boiling points, which will help keep pressure levels low. That, in turn, will limit the risk of high-pressure blowouts in case of any parts failures. 

Kairos is also using a relatively new form of nuclear fuel known as TRISO, which encapsulates tiny seeds of uranium fuel in layers of ceramic and carbon, which are then loaded into billiard ball-sized spheres. The arrangement is intended to prevent meltdowns.

The startup has about five years to get its first power plant up and running, which is an accelerated but manageable timeline in the nuclear industry. To fulfill the terms of its deal with Google, Kairos will need to move even faster on subsequent reactors, something Samsung C&T might be able to help with.