Kevin Hartnett

And that fund still exists after his death.

And these things are paid out.

I actually don't know if the LLMs have received the money or who gets the money when they do it.

But anyway.

When a human solves them, they get the money.

So Paul Erdős collected over 1,000 problems, 1,200 problems that he thought were interesting, and he just kind of left them out there.

The AI labs and these startups have looked for kind of benchmarks, kind of mountains they can climb, things they can do to prove that their models work well.

The IMO was one of the most prominent ones.

They got the gold medal there.

They needed to move on.

They moved on to the Putnam exam, which is the premier college math competition, and started to do quite well there.

And then they just started looking for kind of like new targets.

And these Erdos problems are sitting out there, 1,200 or so problems.

And so they essentially set their models to work on all of them, like see what you can do on them.

And it would cook up answers to them.

And through the beginning part of this year, we would see like on Twitter, one announcement after another, solved Erdos problem 737, solved Erdos problem 63.

And

And I think mathematicians viewed those very kind of like hypey announcements differently than the energy behind the announcements themselves.

I'm going to have to definitely think of some puns.

I'm going to get one pun out before we finish this podcast.