Frank Landymore
Our Take: Sounds amazing. But then I also remember this: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/understanding-suicide/202511/chatgpt-made-him-delusional
Your Takeaway: LLMs can do amazing things. They can also do dumb things. And even the amazing things need your help.
A young man named Liam Price used ChatGPT to solve a difficult math problem that had puzzled experts for over 60 years. Experts say the AI found a new way to approach the problem, but humans had to fix its mistakes. This breakthrough shows AI might help solve tough math questions, but caution is still needed.
Highlights
“The raw output of ChatGPT’s proof was actually quite poor. So it required an expert to kind of sift through and actually understand what it was trying to say,” Jared Lichtman, a mathematician at Stanford University whose doctoral thesis centered on one Erdős’s conjectures, told *SciAm*.
Still, it required humans to apply the finishing touches.
Earlier this month, 23-year-old Liam Price shared a solution to one of the so-called Erdős problems, a series of famously abstruse math conjectures left behind by the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős. While some of these conjectures have gotten the better of savants in the field, Price, who has no advanced math degree, seemingly stumbled on a solution for one of them by simply prompting GPT-5.4 for an answer.
Did ChatGPT just solve an arcane math problem that’s foiled mathematicians for over sixty years? Some leading experts say yes, *Scientific American* reports.