“It's gone from problems no one really cared about or noticed… to ones that, oh, some very accomplished mathematicians have spent their entire careers trying and failing to do this. And they did it in like three days.”
The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026
Verge reporter Robert Hart on how AI lab models have been working through lists of open problems in mathematics over the past few months. He added that half the time the labs can't tell whether a result works and rely on mathematicians to check.
Transcript
…the kind of pinnacle of knowledge. And it's, I think, easy for them to try and sort of show off in that area. And yeah, and it's always been quite terrible. And then the last few months, very good, it seems. And like, and by very good, kind of on par with the best human mathematicians. So a little
bit like the coding phenomenon kind of nine months ago, that all of a sudden it went from a thing computers can do that it seems like AI might someday be able to do, but isn't quite there yet to all of a sudden overnight, oh my God, this actually works.
Yeah. And I mean, well, not that half the time you can even tell it works. They sort of rely on the mathematicians for that. But yeah, basically, it's like there's all these problems that are kind of labeled as open problems in the field and they've just kind of been mowing through them. And it's gone from kind of problems no one really cared about or noticed, or oh, I've maybe heard of that here or there, to ones that, oh, some very accomplished mathematicians have spent their entire careers trying and failing to do this. And they did it in like three days. So yeah, it's a very quick, quick change.
Yeah. And were the people steeped in this on the mathematics side surprised by this? Like, obviously, this has been a surprise to those of us who are not paying close attention, but there's an industry of people who spend their days and nights steeped in this stuff at universities all over the…
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of that perhaps depends on where in mathematics you look for. It's kind of a field that varies between you've got some who are very much like, I use my chalkboard and my chalk. And that is how I work through to they're using these types of tools. And so they're quite…
Interesting. Well, and yeah, walk me through the figuring out what it means. Cause I think when you say this is a human story, I think this is a lot of what we're talking about, right? There is this thing that happens. And I think a lot of people are either dealing with the reality of this already…
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