OpenAI makes breakthrough on 80-year-old maths problem

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/21/openai-paul-erdos-maths-problem-breakthrough

One of my classmates from undergrad, as well as one of my TAs, were on the team at OpenAI that did this (I am not currently in touch with either of them).

There's still a lot of uncertainty as to how far this is going to go, but it's clear that LLMs are a transformative technology and I feel that this is something that the free software movement needs to take more seriously. From what I've seen, Richard Stallman seems oblivious to how good the latest models have gotten.

Even if AI doesn't replace humans completely, it seems inevitable that it will be a requirement to remain competitive in any kind of knowledge work. Fields such as pure mathematics that in the past only required pencil and paper will now be dependent on proprietary models from OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. all run on NVIDIA GPUs sitting in data centers. And we may see a future in which the most successful people will be whoever can afford to pay for the most advanced models.