OpenAI’s New AI Is Doing Things We Barely Understand
OpenAI released 722 AI-generated mathematical papers claiming proofs of previously unsolved theorems
“These are not elegant proofs. Some of them are a big ball of barf.”
OpenAI released 722 AI-generated mathematical results, including claimed proofs of long-standing open problems such as irrational triangular billiards and universal conformal mapping theorems. The mathematical community is divided: while the results may be correct, the proofs are computationally brute-forced rather than elegant, raising philosophical questions about what counts as mathematical understanding. This signals a potential inflection point in AI-assisted scientific discovery, with AI now operating at the frontier of unsolved mathematics.