Did AI Just “Solve” Math? (Let’s Take a Closer Look) | AI Reality Check
5/28/202632 min
Cal Newport takes a critical look at recent AI News. Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia (0:00) Did AI just “solve” math? (2:38) What OpenAI did (6:30) Question #1 - Is this result that important? (7:34) Question #2 - Does this mean LLMs are now smarter than human mathematicians? (17:50) Question #3 - Does this mean all equally hard challenges will now be conquered by AI? (23:27) Question #4 - What is the future of math? (28:27) Concluding thoughts Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at www.calnewport.com/slow https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-conjecture/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Br4l9YjCyRU https://x.com/PeterDiamandis/status/2058956956077871275 https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/74c24085-19b0-4534-9c90-465b8e29ad73/unit-distance-remarks.pdf Thanks to Jesse Miller for production and mastering and Nate Mechler for research and newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsCal Newport· Host0:00
Last week, OpenAI published a press release titled An OpenAI Model Has Disproved a Central Conjecture in Discrete Geometry. They were talking specifically about the planar unit distance problem, which was first posed by Paul Erdős in nineteen forty-six. Now, this is actually a, a pretty simple problem to state. It basically says, what is the maximum number of pairs of points in a set of N points in a flat plane that can be exactly one unit of distance apart? Now, back in the nineteen forties, Erdős proposed an answer to this question. He couldn't prove it, but he thought he knew what the answer was. Last week, OpenAI essentially announced that they had used an LLM to prove that Erdős' proposed answer was, in fact, incorrect. The OpenAI press release was accompanied by a video that featured dramatic music and a group of researchers writing earnestly on a comically small blackboard as they explained why this was a big deal. Here, let's play a clip of that video.
Speaker 2· Soundbite1:00
[dramatic music] This is the first mathematical breakthrough due to an AI. It's, it's been described as the, the most well-known problem in combinatorial geometry. Uh, so for, for a whole subfield of mathematics, it- it's, like, maybe the best-known problem there is.
Cal Newport· Host1:20
The mainstream press soon picked up on this story with enthusi- enthusiasm. Here's the New Scientist headline, "Mathematicians stunned by AI's biggest breakthrough in mathematics."