AI just solved an 80-year-old ‘Erdős problem,’ and mathematicians are amazed
After 80 years of fruitless struggle by human mathematicians, a major geometry conjecture has at last been solved—via a straightforward query to a chatbot. The company OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, announced the result yesterday, together with comments from a number of experts, who declared the artificial intelligence’s method “clever” and “elegant.” “No previous AI-generated proof has come close” to meeting those high standards, wrote Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, in commentary solicited by OpenAI.
