OpenAI's reasoning model just did what decades of human mathematicians couldn't — it cracked a major open problem posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. Fields Medal winner Timothy Gowers called it a genuine milestone, noting no previous AI-generated proof has come close. This is real proof that AI is unlocking new frontiers in mathematical discovery.
The OpenAI math result is being oversold — mathematicians had to extract and rewrite the proof from a long, messy transcript, and the model only succeeded by grinding through paths humans found too tedious to bother with. There's no denominator showing how many failed attempts preceded this one. Generalizing this narrow win into broad AI brilliance is a stretch that serves marketing more than science.
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