Cal Newport

Is this result really important, right?

There's been some issues before where AI companies have claimed we solved these important math problems and then other mathematicians came along and said, well, that's already been solved.

You probably just saw in your training data or that problem is really minor.

Is this the same or is this actually a really important problem?

And the answer is yes, it is important.

It is important in the sense that it's a well-known problem.

And everyone just assumed that Erdos' proposed answer was correct.

So it really was surprising to mathematicians to learn, oh, he was wrong.

No one had come up with that before.

I don't know how many people are actually trying to prove the counterexample, but no one had come up with that before.

All right.

Also, it's a result that you could publish in a top venue.

And they're going to, I assume.

I mean, there's some complexities about how do you cite this and how do you do authorship, right?

But if a human had come up, if they had come up with this exact result without the help of an LLM, boom, annals mathematics, right?

It's a big deal to show that Erdos was wrong.

So it is an important result, and it surprised a lot of people.

All right, question number two that a lot of people are asking.

Does this mean LLMs are now smarter than human mathematicians?

The short answer here is no, but I want to provide you a long answer as well.