No, what is happening is that the AI is really good at connecting the dots and human mathematicians aren't.
OpenAI is explicitly not taking credit, btw.
People will be getting second-hand embarrassment when they read these comments in the future.
There are ways to do what they are doing ethically. But this isn't it.
However, with an eye on private AI as a business desperate for attention and profits, the only way out of this is to build open source research AI - better than anything the closed frontiers have to offer. It should be under the full control of the people who use it and trained to support the accepted ethics and citation discipline.
This ought to be good. Please share. Be specific.
https://tenor.com/en-CA/view/eating-popcorn-deer-hungry-yum-...
I watched a Zoom presentation yesterday {10/28/2026) at Courant by Maksym Radziwill on the QRH result with the constant 11/12. It used four known ideas, but linked them together in a way that mathematicians had steered themselves away from. He gave a short sentence with four phrases that he said, if they had been sent to him by time machine, would have let him work out the proof years ago. All the details were straightforward once that high level plan was in place.
The advantage AI had here was, in his words, it lacks psychology. Humans had a prejudice that a certain approach would not be fruitful, but the AI didn't have that. The AI could explore superficially unproductive avenues at great depth, not having to do as much pruning to conserve mental effort. And as it turned out one of those approaches worked.
AI is going to fill in a lot of blind spots, I think.
It does not. It's more like if all those researchers had been "labelling" stuff for the AI, so that the AI can now solve those problems. But they were not paid by the AI company for their "labelling" work, and they never agreed to "label" anything in the first place.
It only requires that several different mathematicians knowingly found partial results but weren't aware of the results made by other mathematicians.
Have you every used AI for work on truly cutting edge at least graduate level academic research? It's nothing like writing software, i do both professionally. Every model I've had access to requires a LOT of hand holding to get it to do the right thing. No model is getting set up with a single prompt, told to go, and then solving a millennium problem (unless they've explicitly stated that, which i would still doubt). It takes a lot of guidance to get these AIs to solve any serious problem. It's not outside at least my reach to believe that openAI is taking these nudges from intelligent people and combining those with the internal, non public models to make great press releases as it tumbled towards an infinite debt wall. I don't think there's a thing they wouldn't do to save their company.
Preprint link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.33179
Author's post on LinkedIn with details: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/christopher-herzog-a2985229a_...
Prompt to GPT-5.6 Sol:
"I would like you to write for me a short article that could be published in Physical Review Letters. I would like you to choose the question, do the analysis and write up the results. The constraints I put on the question are 1) that it should be in the hep-th set of topics (so that I have a hope of evaluating the arguments and results); 2) the answer can be written up in a short format of 5 pages or less; 3) the result is of significance enough that it can be published in PRL. I want to break up the task into several steps. The first is to find a good question, so give me three candidates. I’m also going to involve Claude in the process. Claude is going to find three candidates too, and the next step will be to evaluate each others’ candidate questions."
This is not a model one-shotting a published paper! It's not even published! Anyone with a name can get a preprint up. I read this to mean that he gave it a prompt to find problems, then _he evaluated and chose the problem_, undoubtedly to be someone simple and quick which could be presented in less than 5 pages. After that he let the program work on its own for "a couple of hours". After which he spent _2 weeks_ with the model to improve the results. This does not argue against my point, this is exactly what I'm saying. Of course a model can do parts of the process, but it's terrible at writing it up "in a way mere mortals can understand". You have to hand hold and guide and do work yourself. And this is by an established professor in the field with a record of publications.
I ask you again, have _you_ used this technology to perform graduate+ level research?
We have a big announcement! But we are not taking credit.
We or organizing all these people to figure out how to process our latest fabulous output. But we didn't do anything? Nope, no credit here.