Mathematics

Opening — Why this matters now AI models are now fluent in contest math, symbolic manipulation, and polished explanations. That’s the easy part. The harder question—the one that actually matters for science—is whether these systems can do research when the answer is not already in the training set. The paper First Proof arrives as a deliberately uncomfortable experiment: ten genuine research-level mathematics questions, all solved by humans, none previously public, and all temporarily withheld from the internet. ...

What happens when we ask the smartest AI models to do something truly difficult—like solve a real math problem and prove their answer is correct? That’s the question tackled by a group of researchers in their paper “Mathematical Proof as a Litmus Test.” Instead of testing AI with casual tasks like summarizing news or answering trivia, they asked it to write formal mathematical proofs—the kind that leave no room for error. And the results? Surprisingly poor. ...