Nathaniel (NLW) Whittemore

The next thing that happened was a seemingly small gaffe that represented to some just how far ahead of reality the hype machine had gotten.

Over the weekend, in a since-deleted tweet, OpenAI's VP of Science Kevin Wheel wrote, GPT-5 found solutions to 10 previously unsolved Erdos problems and made progress on 11 others.

These have all been open for decades.

Now, the Erdos problems are a set of more than 1,000 unsolved math problems proposed by Paul Erdos and maintained after his death,

with modest cash prizes attached.

407 have been solved to date.

This was followed, however, by Oxford University mathematician Thomas Bloom, who maintains the Erdos Problems website, correcting Wheel, writing, This is a dramatic misrepresentation.

GBT-5 found references which solve these problems that I was personally unaware of.

He clarified that, quote, the open status only means I personally am unaware of a paper which solves it.

Now, Bloom continued, GPT-5 has been a very useful tool in searching the literature, and this has been a valuable addition to the website.

Its literature searching ability is already useful and impressive enough.

No need to describe it as something it's not.

Part of why the conversation picked up steam is that Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis waded into the fray, responding, this is embarrassing.

Three words which got 1.2 million views.

Meta's chief AI scientist, Jan LeCun, added his own pun, hoisted by their own GPT-tards.

The folks from OpenAI deleted their post, including Sebastian Bubeck, who wrote, I deleted the post.

I didn't mean to mislead anyone, obviously.

I thought the phrasing was clear.

Sorry about that.

Only solutions in the literature were found.