OpenAI Announces Solution to 80-Year-Old Mathematical Puzzle
OpenAI announced that its new reasoning model has provided an original mathematical proof refuting a famous unsolved hypothesis in geometry. This problem was first proposed by Paul Erdős in 1946. This is not the first such claim from OpenAI, but this time the results appear much more significant. This is reported by Techcrunch.com .
Seven months ago, former company vice president Kevin Weil claimed that the GPT-5 model had solved 10 of Erdős's unsolved problems. However, it later turned out that the model had simply found solutions already existing in literature. This error drew criticism from rivals such as Yann LeCun and Google DeepMind head Demis Hassabis. This time, to avoid repeating the mistake, OpenAI verified the proof in collaboration with renowned mathematicians like Noga Alon and Thomas Bloom.
"For nearly 80 years, mathematicians believed that the best solutions would resemble square grids. The OpenAI model refuted this belief and discovered an entirely new family of constructions that work more efficiently," the company stated. This is considered the first instance of artificial intelligence independently solving a central problem in mathematics.
OpenAI emphasizes that this proof was not performed by a system built specifically for mathematics, but by a new general-purpose reasoning model. This signifies an increase in the ability of AI systems to connect long and complex logical chains. Such a breakthrough is expected to enable new discoveries in biology, physics, engineering, and medicine in the future.
