OpenAI’s math breakthrough played to AI’s strengths

I tried to explain OpenAI’s solution more clearly than OpenAI did.

This post originally appeared in Understanding AI.

“If a generally available model could disprove this famous conjecture and no one noticed, what other discoveries could happen today that no one has thought to try?”

Last week, OpenAI announced that an internal AI model had disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, a famous problem in discrete geometry that had stumped human mathematicians for the last 80 years.

OpenAI gave several mathematicians early access to the result and published their reactions. Tim Gowers — who won the Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in mathematics — wrote that “there is no doubt that the solution to the unit-distance problem is a milestone in AI mathematics.”

University of Toronto professor Daniel Litt wrote that “this is the first example of a result produced autonomously by an AI that I find exciting in itself, as opposed to as a leading indicator.”