Put your math hats on for a minute, and let’s take a look at what this beef from mid-October was about. It’s a perfect example of what’s wrong with AI right now.
Bubeck was excited that GPT-5 seemed to have somehow solved a number of puzzles known as Erdős problems.
Paul Erdős, one of the most prolific mathematicians of the 20th century, left behind hundreds of puzzles when he died. To help keep track of which ones have been solved, Thomas Bloom, a mathematician at the University of Manchester, UK, set up erdosproblems.com, which lists more than 1,100 problems and notes that around 430 of them come with solutions.
When Bubeck celebrated GPT-5’s breakthrough, Bloom was quick to call him out. “This is a dramatic misrepresentation,” he wrote on X. Bloom explained that a problem isn’t necessarily unsolved if this website does not list a solution. That simply means Bloom wasn’t aware of one. There are millions of mathematics papers out there, and nobody has read all of them. But GPT-5 probably has.
It turned out that instead of coming up with new solutions to 10 unsolved problems, GPT-5 had scoured the internet for 10 existing solutions that Bloom hadn’t seen before. Oops!
There are two takeaways here. One is that breathless claims about big breakthroughs shouldn’t be made via social media: Less knee jerk and more gut check.
The second is that GPT-5’s ability to find references to previous work that Bloom wasn’t aware of is also amazing. The hype overshadowed something that should have been pretty cool in itself.
Mathematicians are very interested in using LLMs to trawl through vast numbers of existing results, François Charton, a research scientist who studies the application of LLMs to mathematics at the AI startup Axiom Math, told me when I talked to him about this Erdős gotcha.
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