Did AI Just “Solve” Math? (Let’s Take a Closer Look) | AI Reality Check

Last week, OpenAI published a press release titled, An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry. They were talking specifically about the planar unit distance problem, which was first posed by Paul Erdosch in 1946. Now this is actually a pretty simple problem to state. It basically says What is the maximum number of pairs of points in a set of endpoints in a flat plane that can be exactly one unit of distance apart?

Now back in the 1940s, Aerdosh proposed an answer to this question. He couldn't prove it, but he thought he knew what the answer was. Last week, OpenAI essentially announced that they had used an LLM to prove that Aerdosh's proposed answer was in fact incorrect. The OpenAI press release was accompanied by a video. that featured dramatic music and a group of researchers writing earnestly on a comically small blackboard as they explained why this was a big deal.

Here, let's play a clip of that video. This is the first mathematical breakthrough due to an AI. It's been described as the the most well-known problem in combinatorial geometry. So for for a whole subfield of mathematics it's like maybe the best known problem there is. The mainstream press soon picked up on this story with enthusiasm.

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