Item — HN Reader

"I understand the frustration with the constant PR-hype these AI labs keep spewing out"

Apparently you don't.

"These are real problems mathematicians and computer scientists have been working on and were unable to make progress on."

Who says no one was making progress? Who says openai has made progress? How would anyone not working on these specific problems, witho the time to dig into openai's claims, be able to tell? Why should this not be lumped in with all the other ai hype being pushed?

"The mathematicians I know are saying that the latest crop of models is changing the way people do research math, I think that's a pretty big deal."

Who? And doing what?

We have been hearing the "this generation of models is the one" type talk for years and the only concrete "big deals" are what? A tool for college students to write papers? A replacement for, now enshitified, google search? The fact that now you can fake tons of stuff to support a position or claim tons of stuff that goes against your position is fake?

1 comments

I want to preface my response by saying that I don't buy most of what the AI labs say. I don't think that LLMs will replace most white collar labor for example. I also find many of the practices of these labs to be abhorrent. However, all of these opinions are orthogonal to the fact that LLMs have gotten extremely good at mathematics.

> Who says no one was making progress?

Let's look at the Jacobian conjecture, since that was the open math problem I was most familiar with prior to its solution. Yitang Zhang, one of the worlds most renown mathematicians (famous for his lower bound on the twin prime conjecture) spent 8 years working on this problem with his advisor (who himself is a renown mathematician) and turned up completely empty handed. His advisor described it as a "waste [of] 7 years of his own life and my time" [1]. Of course, these two were not the only ones working on this problem for the almost 100 years its been open, but they should have sufficient credentials to show that they were not fools or amateurs.

And in a single afternoon an LLM disproved the conjecture. How is that not an extraordinary feat of technology?

> Who? And doing what?

A close friend is studying differential geometry in a PhD program. Sadly I doubt anything I say on his work will convince you, so I will instead offer two anecdotes:

Terrence Tao (widely considered the worlds greatest living mathematician) has said AI is precipitating "a crisis in the foundations of mathematical values and practices" [2].

Timothy Growers (fields medalist & one of the leading researchers in combinatorics) has said that the latest models are now at the point where they are "producing a piece of PhD-level research in an hour or so, with no serious mathematical input from me" [3].

You can find many more fields medalists and mathematics researchers with the same impression. If you look in this thread you can see bluesky/twitter threads from those who were actively researching some of these problems who are in shock at the solutions.

[1] https://www.math.purdue.edu/~ttm/ZhangYt.pdf [2] https://teorth.github.io/tao-web/slides/age-of-ai-icm-2026.p... [3] https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/05/08/a-recent-experience-...

[1] is... a read (sounds like a nightmare student, or research prof, or both). A dumb question but by my reading, that work took place 35 years ago, has there not been anything more relevant since then? Something Claude could have for instance used as a basis for what it did? Does seem like a feat however you cut it though.

Thank you for the thoughts and references.

Yeah the Yitang Zhang situation just sounds like a total nightmare all around.

There was definitely at least some progress on the problem. I get the general sense that there were potential counterexamples that were close but not quite enough, and that its possible (or even likely) that Claude built on those in order to construct its solution. I also get the sense that when Zhang was working on the problem it was believed that it would be proved true, but since then there were bounds found on the problem that pointed researchers to believe it was false. I am not a research mathematician in this field though, so I could definitely be wrong.

Also, in fairness to Zhang, I believe the dissertation he ended up writing was focused on the 2D case in particular, which is still unsolved (the counter example is only for 3D and above). I cannot imagine that anyone looking at the 2D problem was not also looking at the general case as well though.