An OpenAI model solved a famous math problem that stumped humans for 80 years

In mid-May, 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, 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 he finds exciting in itself, as opposed to as a leading indicator. It is arguably the first time that an AI system has found a proof resolving a major open conjecture. Three years ago, LLMs struggled to solve arithmetic problems. It was only last year that LLMs started acing high school mathematics competitions. When attending the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January, it was learned that AI systems were starting to contribute to mathematical research, but only in constrained settings. OpenAI's new result is the next step in this progression. The AI model cleverly applied existing ideas drawn from several subfields of mathematics to create a full proof. The result has since been cleaned up and extended by human mathematicians.