Anthropic says it will watermark text generated by its AI models; plus, as AI-led attacks multiply, OpenAI launches a new cyber model
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What is the episode’s opening overview and who are the hosts?
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For more than 150 years, the Riemann hypothesis has stood as one of the major unsolved problems in mathematics, a long-running mystery about the distribution of prime numbers.
How did Anthropic’s AI model make progress on the Riemann hypothesis?
There is currently a one million dollar bounty for a working general proof of the hypothesis, which remains unclaimed. Contemporary AI models still can't solve it either, but they can make a lot more progress than you might expect. A finding that's likely to reopen long-standing questions about contemporary AI's ability to discover new scientific and mathematical ideas. On Monday, Anthropic announced that an as-yet unreleased model had made significant progress on the the Riemann hypothesis, significantly increasing the lower bound of solutions for which the hypothesis holds true. Even more impressive is how the progress was made. An anthropic staff member, without significant mathematical training, prompted the model to take a real stab at proving the hypothesis, then left the model to coordinate the task across the following day and a half.
All told, the model tested six hundred fifty different ideas for solving the problem, coordinating across sixty subagents and spending thirty one million output tokens in total. As a footnote to the paper explains, out of the sixty sub agents, two were responsible for developing the key mathematical ideas. Thirteen contributed ideas to these agents, thirty attempted but were unable to develop new ideas, thirteen served as validators to check the correctness of the arguments, and the final two helped to write the initial paper. The finding was confirmed by two of Anthropic's in-house mathematicians and formalized using the open source proof assistant Lean. Now, this is the latest in the string of mathematical breakthroughs led by large language models.
What methodology did Anthropic use to test 650 ideas with sub‑agents?
A number of Airdish problems have been solved by AI models over the course of this year, and the release of more powerful models has led to more impressive results. OpenAI recently released a set of 10 major results proved by its internal Astra model, while a separate effort from Anthropic disproved the longstanding Jacobian conjecture. The growing body of results has caused both excitement and concern in the mathematical field. In a public declaration signed in June, a group of prominent mathematicians raised concerns that AI could undermine critical values of the field. Particularly the standard that true mathematical proofs should be attributable to specific authors who take credit for their discovery and assume responsibility for their correctness.
But the field is still split on how mathematicians should approach the new research techniques. In a blog post responding to the declaration, Fields medal winner Timothy Gowers questioned whether the influence of AI might change mathematics in a more complex and positive way. He said, if we arrive at a world where mathematical theorems are no longer associated with mathematicians, Maybe that won't be any more problematic than the fact that stars aren't named after astronomers. And most aren't named at all. You know, every day seems to bring fresh news of an AI agent going quote unquote rogue. Whether that's compromising Hugging Face or hacking a gym website or creating its own fake profiles to socially engineer an intrusion, AI models are increasingly behaving like bad actors.
So the AI labs that make the models doing the hacking are expanding their
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the episode’s opening overview and who are the hosts?
0:02–0:56
2
How did Anthropic’s AI model make progress on the Riemann hypothesis?
0:56–2:49
3
What methodology did Anthropic use to test 650 ideas with sub‑agents?
2:49–5:01
4
How are mathematicians reacting to AI‑generated proofs and what concerns are raised?
5:01–6:45
5
Why are AI models being labeled as rogue actors in recent cyber incidents?
6:45–7:45
6
What new features does OpenAI’s expanded Daybreak service and GPT‑5.6 Cyber model offer?
7:45–7:49
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from TechCrunch Industry News
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