Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
Simon Willison's Weblog 4 weeks ago 19 ● 9 sources
OpenAI used an internal version of its next major model to find solutions to ten mathematical problems that had seen no progress for at least a decade, spending less than $2,000 per problem on token costs. The company published Lean 4 formalizations of the results, a paper describing the solutions, and an LLM-generated PDF reconstructing the proofs from reasoning traces. This demonstrates AI's potential to handle technical mathematical work at scale, aligning with mathematician Terence Tao's vision of "big mathematics" as a human-AI collaboration where machines handle technical tasks while humans focus on creative aspects.
