Cal Newport

Now, back in the 1940s, Erdos proposed an answer to this question.

He couldn't prove it, but he thought he knew what the answer was.

Last week, OpenAI essentially announced that they had used an LLM to prove that Erdos' proposed answer was, in fact, incorrect.

The OpenAI press release was accompanied by a video that featured dramatic music and a group of researchers writing earnestly on a comically small blackboard as they explained why this was a big deal.

Here, let's play a clip of that video.

The mainstream press soon picked up on this story with enthusiasm.

Here's the new scientist headline.

Mathematicians stunned by AI's biggest breakthrough in mathematics.

People on X predictably went even more wild.

Peter Diamandis tweeted the following.

An open AI model just proved an 80-year-old math conjecture from Paul Erdos, one of the most prolific mathematicians in history.

We're going to solve everything.

All right, so what's actually going on here?

Did AI just reach genius level?

Has math as a discipline just been automated?

As a theoretical computer scientist myself who has published a lot of applied mathematics research in my days and someone who proudly boasts an Erdos number of three, which you can look up if you don't know what that means, I am, for obvious reasons, particularly interested in these questions.

Well, it's Thursday, which means it's time for an AI Reality Check episode of this show, which is the perfect opportunity to seek some answers.

So that's exactly what we're going to do.

As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world.

All right, so we need to start by getting more specific about what exactly OpenAI actually did, and then we can get into the implications of what that means for the rest of us.