OpenAI claims his up-to-date model of reasoning provided an original mathematical proof refuting the famed unsolved hypotheses in geometry first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946.
If this sounds familiar to you, it’s because this isn’t the first time OpenAI has made such a bold claim. Seven months ago, former vice president of the artificial intelligence giant, Kevin Weil, posted on X: “GPT-5 found solutions to 10 (!) previously unsolved Erdő problems and made progress on 11 others.”
It turns out that GPT-5 didn’t actually solve these problems; he simply found solutions that already existed in the literature.
Taunts from rivals like Yann LeCun and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis followed, and Weil immediately deleted his premature post. At least today it seems that OpenAI hasn’t made the same mistake twice. Along with the announcement, the company published comrade’s comments in support of a rebuttal from mathematicians such as Noga Alon, Melanie Wood, and Thomas Bloom who hold on the Erdos Problems pageand formerly called the Weil brisk “dramatic misrepresentation”.
“For almost 80 years, mathematicians believed that the best possible solutions looked something like square grids.” OpenAI published on X. “The OpenAI model has debunked this belief by discovering an entirely new family of designs that perform better.”
The company stated that this is “the first time that artificial intelligence has independently solved a significant open problem of key importance in the field of mathematics.” According to OpenAI, the proof comes from a up-to-date general-purpose reasoning model, not from a system designed specifically to solve math problems or even this specific problem.
OpenAI says this is significant because it means AI systems are now better able to connect long, challenging chains of reasoning and connect ideas from different fields in ways that researchers may not have explored before. This has implications for biology, physics, engineering and medicine.
“Artificial intelligence is helping us more fully understand the mathematics department we have spent centuries building,” Bloom said in a statement. “What other unseen wonders are waiting in the wings?”