OpenAI is facing sharp criticism from across the artificial intelligence and academic communities after claims that its GPT-5 model had “solved” ten of Paul Erdős’s famous unsolved mathematical problems were exposed as inaccurate.
The controversy erupted after OpenAI executives publicly suggested that the AI system had made groundbreaking progress in pure mathematics — a claim later debunked as a misunderstanding of what constituted “unsolved” problems.
From “Breakthrough” to Blunder
The incident began when OpenAI Vice President Kevin Weil posted on X (formerly Twitter) that GPT-5 had “found solutions to ten unsolved Erdős problems and made progress on eleven more.” The announcement was echoed by OpenAI researcher Sébastien Bubeck, who framed the achievement as evidence that “AI-driven scientific acceleration has begun.”
The implication was clear: GPT-5 had autonomously generated new mathematical proofs, marking a potential leap forward in machine reasoning.
Mathematician Exposes the Error
However, mathematician Thomas Bloom, curator of the website ErdosProblems.com, quickly refuted the claims, describing them as “a dramatic misrepresentation.” Bloom explained that the “open” status of certain problems on his website simply meant he was unaware of published solutions — not that they were genuinely unsolved.
“GPT-5 did not discover new proofs,” Bloom said. “It merely retrieved existing academic papers that I hadn’t yet catalogued.”
Following Bloom’s clarification, OpenAI...
Russia is actively embedding disinformation into chatbots and AI services globally, transforming large language models (LLMs) into a new battlefield for its information warfare. In the digital era...