OpenAI claims to have solved an 80-year-old mathematical problem, for real this time

OpenAI Claims Her new inference model produced an original mathematical proof refuting the famous unsolved conjecture in geometry, first proposed by Paul Erdös in 1946.

If this sounds familiar to you, it’s because this isn’t the first time OpenAI has made such a bold claim. Seven months agoArtificial intelligence giant Former Vice President Kevin Weill Posted on

It turns out that GPT-5 didn’t actually solve those problems; I just found solutions that already existed in the literature.

Taunts from competitors such as Yann LeCun and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis followed, and Weil quickly resigned from his position prematurely. Today, at least, it appears that OpenAI has not made the same mistake twice. Along with this announcement, the company published Accompanying notes In support of the refutation provided by mathematicians such as Noga Alon, Melanie Wood, and Thomas Bloom, who asserts Erdos problems websiteand was formerly called Weil’s Prism “Dramatic twist.”

“For nearly 80 years, mathematicians have believed that the best possible solutions look roughly like square grids.” OpenAI is deployed on X. “The OpenAI model has now disproven this belief, discovering an entirely new family of better-performing constructs.”

The company said this represents “the first time that artificial intelligence has independently solved a prominent open problem central to the field of mathematics.” The proof, according to OpenAI, came from a new general-purpose reasoning model, not a system specifically designed to solve mathematical problems or even this problem in particular.

OpenAI says this is important because it means that AI systems are now better able to piece together long, difficult chains of reasoning and connect ideas across domains in ways that researchers may not have explored before. This has implications for biology, physics, engineering and medicine.

“AI helps us more fully explore the cathedral of mathematics we have built over centuries,” Bloom said in a statement. “What other unseen wonders await us?”