I want to preface my response by saying that I don't buy most of what the AI labs say. I don't think that LLMs will replace most white collar labor for example.

I want to preface my response by saying that I don't buy most of what the AI labs say. I don't think that LLMs will replace most white collar labor for example. I also find many of the practices of these labs to be abhorrent. However, all of these opinions are orthogonal to the fact that LLMs have gotten extremely good at mathematics. > Who says no one was making progress? Let's look at the Jacobian conjecture, since that was the open math problem I was most familiar with prior to its solution. Yitang Zhang, one of the worlds most renown mathematicians (famous for his lower bound on the twin prime conjecture) spent 8 years working on this problem with his advisor (who himself is a renown mathematician) and turned up completely empty handed. His advisor described it as a "waste [of] 7 years of his own life and my time" [1]. Of course, these two were not the only ones working on this problem for the almost 100 years its been open, but they should have sufficient credentials to show that they were not fools or amateurs. And in a single afternoon an LLM disproved the conjecture. How is that not an extraordinary feat of technology? > Who? And doing what? A close friend is studying differential geometry in a PhD program. Sadly I doubt anything I say on his work will convince you, so I will instead offer two anecdotes: Terrence Tao (widely considered the worlds greatest living mathematician) has said AI is precipitating "a crisis in the foundations of mathematical values and practices" [2]. Timothy Growers (fields medalist & one of the leading researchers in combinatorics) has said that the latest models are now at the point where they are "producing a piece of PhD-level research in an hour or so, with no serious mathematical input from me" [3]. You can find many more fields medalists and mathematics researchers with the same impression. If you look in this thread you can see bluesky/twitter threads from those who were actively researching some of these problems who are in shock at the solutions. [1] https://www.math.purdue.edu/~ttm/ZhangYt.pdf https://www.math.purdue.edu/~ttm/ZhangYt.pdf [2] https://teorth.github.io/tao-web/slides/age-of-ai-icm-2026.pdf https://teorth.github.io/tao-web/slides/age-of-ai-icm-2026.p... [3] https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/05/08/a-recent-experience-with-chatgpt-5-5-pro/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/05/08/a-recent-experience-...