Most early AI-driven Erdős problem solutions came from hobbyists using public LLMs rather than corporate labs.
4 events · 1 assessment · 2 decisions
Structured and assessed
First pass. Read the Quanta source whole and corrected the instance's metadata (speaker Thomas Bloom as paraphrased by Quanta, publication, date); recorded a provenance reading (asserts without evidence) and an immaterial source map. Read the Tao-project wiki "AI contributions to Erdős problems" in full and tallied full-solution rows before 20 May 2026: 49 public-tool rows vs 16 corporate-internal, robust to excluding Aristotle-only and professional-mathematician rows. Decomposition kept light: matched and attached the existing DeepMind 9-of-353 claim (8b69da04) as supports; a lateral link to the umbrella claim "AI systems have autonomously resolved open Erdős problems" (56e32774). The Matcher found no node for the bare OpenAI unit-distance disproof event; not minted here since it is not a dependency of this claim (it marks the end of the "early" window). Canonical form kept: "hobbyists" is Bloom's word and the discourse's, and the reading is explained in the assessment. Importance set 0.35, contestation 0.3 (Extractor prior 0.4). Assessed supported, credence 0.8, confidence 0.75, yield 0.25. No dependents exist, so no notification. Scientific American (April 2026) read and judged not an instance: it describes one case and does not assert the general proposition.
Assessed Supported
verdict confidence 0.75 · credence 0.80
The claim describes the first wave of AI-assisted resolutions of Erdős problems, roughly December 2025 to the OpenAI unit-distance announcement of 20 May 2026, and holds up on the public record. The community wiki maintained under Terence Tao's Erdős problems project, which logs every AI contribution posted to erdosproblems.com along with the labs' own announcements, lists about 68 full solutions in that window. Roughly three quarters of them were obtained by people outside the AI labs prompting publicly available systems (chiefly GPT-5.2, 5.4 and 5.5 Pro, with Gemini, Claude and Harmonic's Aristotle prover), and about a quarter by corporate systems not available to the public: OpenAI's internal model, DeepMind's prover agents and its Aletheia system. The outsiders were mostly amateurs, students and non-academic professionals such as Liam Price, Kevin Barreto, Wouter van Doorn, Przemek Chojecki and Boon Suan Ho, with a few professional mathematicians among them. The picture is one of count, not of weight. The most significant early results, above all the counterexample to the unit distance conjecture and the batch of solutions OpenAI announced in April 2026, came from internal corporate models, and DeepMind's autonomous agent resolved nine formal statements at a few hundred dollars each. Many of the hobbyist solutions were to obscure problems, and a fair number turned out to duplicate forgotten literature. Read as a statement about numbers, the claim is well supported; read as a statement about where the mathematically important advances came from, it would not be. The only recorded assertion of it is Thomas Bloom's observation as reported by Quanta Magazine, but the tally that supports it is independent of that report.
Updated claim instance
Instance 8ac08773-2f06-4eab-9dd7-854d180c37dc (https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-legendary-erdos-problems-are-falling-to-ai-20260803/): was stance=affirms, confidence=0.75; set speaker="Thomas Bloom (as paraphrased by Konstantin Kakaes)", publication="Quanta Magazine", sourceDate="2026-08-03", context="Quanta feature on AI and the Erdős problems; the sentence reports the surprise of Thomas Bloom, who runs erdosproblems.com, that despite attention from OpenAI, Google DeepMind and startups, most new results up to May 2026 had come from hobbyists and undergraduates using public LLMs. The article's next sentence marks OpenAI's 20 May 2026 unit-distance announcement as the point where that changed.". The stored instance had no speaker, publication or date. Reading the article shows the assertion is Quanta's indirect report of Thomas Bloom's observation ("Bloom was surprised that ... most of the new results had come from hobbyists..."), so the voice is Bloom's as paraphrased by the article's author, in Quanta Magazine, dated 3 August 2026. The stance (affirms) and passage were correct.
Claim entered the graph