OpenAI Reasoning Model Disproves 80-Year-Old Erdős Geometry Conjecture — Verified by External Mathematicians

OpenAI Blog·high signal

OpenAI announced May 20 that a general-purpose reasoning model disproved Paul Erdős's 1946 unit distance conjecture by discovering an entirely new family of constructions that outperform square grids. Unlike OpenAI's embarrassing false claim seven months ago, this proof was independently verified by external mathematicians who published a companion paper. The AI connected the problem to algebraic number theory rather than relying on geometric tricks — notably, the model was not specifically trained for mathematics.