OpenAI: An AI Disproved an Erdős Conjecture

OpenAI announced that an internal general-purpose reasoning model disproved the unit-distance conjecture Paul Erdős posed in 1946, constructing point families that beat the square grid mathematicians had considered essentially optimal for 80 years. External mathematicians including Noga Alon and Timothy Gowers verified it and published companion "Remarks on the disproof", and Princeton's Will Sawin sharpened the bound within days. The HN thread (1,429 points) spent most of its energy on one question: how autonomous is "autonomously"? Still: a real open problem, actually closed. Erdős would have paid out $500 for this one.

Sources: OpenAI announcement, arXiv remarks, HN thread, Gil Kalai's blog