I will begin by briefly motivating, and surveying a few well established stochastic methods which are used in connection with the Navier-Stokes equations. I will then focus on a more recent approach, which derives an exact formulation of the $3$-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations based on noisy particle paths. I will discuss applications of this formulation, and connections with a turbulence model of Rozovskii and Mikulevicius.