Konstantin Kakaes at Quanta:On May 20, 2026, OpenAI made an announcement that shook the mathematical world. An internal AI model — one not available to the public — had come up with a counterexample to the “unit distance” problem(opens a new tab), a conjecture made in 1946 by Paul Erdős, the prolific, itinerant Hungarian mathematician. Erdős posed thousands of questions, but this one was special: It was both simple to explain and mathematically deep. It was the first historically significant proof to come from an AI model. Then on August 1, OpenAI announced(opens a new tab) that an unreleased model named Astra made 10 additional mathematical advances, including finding solutions to three more problems posed by Erdős.