I’m quite certain that a few months ago, some problems were claimed to be solved by AI. However, those claims were actually false and were exactly that, solved erdos problems that were not marked as solved and the solution was "found" by AI.
The corollary is that this is a very valuable capability of AI!
The ability to find incredibly obscure facts and recall them to solve "officially unsolved" problems in minutes is like Google Search on steroids. In some sense, it is one core component of "deep expertise", and humans rely on the same methodology regularly to solve "hard" problems. Many mathematicians have said that they all just use a "bag of tricks" they've picked up and apply them to problems to see if they work. The LLMs have a huge bag of very obscure tricks, and are starting to reach the point that they can effectively apply them also.
I suspect the threshold of AGI will be crossed when the AIs can invent novel "tricks" on their own, and memorise their own new approach for future use without explicitly having to have their weights updated with "offline" training runs.
How is that a "tin-foil-hat" take? It's not a secret, and in fact widely reported, that these companies are spending billions on creating training data.
So you think that OpenAI paid some mathematicians to either solve this conjecture problem, or a bunch of related unpublished math related to it, then fed it into an LLM model so they could announce it as being solved by the model? How is that not a conspiracy theory?
I'm not letting the government read my brainwaves.
In all seriousness though: My suggestion is that those shepherding the frontier of AI start acting with more transparency, and stop acting in ways that encourage conspiratorial thinking. Especially if the technology is as powerful as they market it as.
I’m quite certain that a few months ago, some problems were claimed to be solved by AI. However, those claims were actually false and were exactly that, solved erdos problems that were not marked as solved and the solution was "found" by AI.
edit: >> https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/19/openais-embarrassing-math/
The corollary is that this is a very valuable capability of AI!
The ability to find incredibly obscure facts and recall them to solve "officially unsolved" problems in minutes is like Google Search on steroids. In some sense, it is one core component of "deep expertise", and humans rely on the same methodology regularly to solve "hard" problems. Many mathematicians have said that they all just use a "bag of tricks" they've picked up and apply them to problems to see if they work. The LLMs have a huge bag of very obscure tricks, and are starting to reach the point that they can effectively apply them also.
I suspect the threshold of AGI will be crossed when the AIs can invent novel "tricks" on their own, and memorise their own new approach for future use without explicitly having to have their weights updated with "offline" training runs.
How is that a "tin-foil-hat" take? It's not a secret, and in fact widely reported, that these companies are spending billions on creating training data.
So you think that OpenAI paid some mathematicians to either solve this conjecture problem, or a bunch of related unpublished math related to it, then fed it into an LLM model so they could announce it as being solved by the model? How is that not a conspiracy theory?
I'm not letting the government read my brainwaves.
In all seriousness though: My suggestion is that those shepherding the frontier of AI start acting with more transparency, and stop acting in ways that encourage conspiratorial thinking. Especially if the technology is as powerful as they market it as.