Checking the math behind OpenAI and Anthropic's latest headlines
OpenAI recently announced a breakthrough in solving a long-standing mathematical problem related to the planar unit distance conjecture. The achievement was made possible through a new reasoning model that utilized chain-of-thought reasoning to explore the problem in ways that human mathematicians had not. While the result is impressive, it raises questions about the practical implications and the marketing motivations behind the announcement.
- ▪OpenAI's model disproved a conjecture from discrete geometry first proposed by Paul Erdős 80 years ago.
- ▪The model used chain-of-thought reasoning to systematically explore the problem.
- ▪Experts noted that the success of the model does not imply it is 'smarter' than human mathematicians, but rather enhances their capabilities.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 3 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Hacker News (Newest) |
| Canonical URL | https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/checking-the-math-behind-openai-and |
| Publication time | Thu, 21 May 2026 20:17:47 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-21T20:31:35.748Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-21T20:31:35.748Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | HrLWABykJElA · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Checking the math behind OpenAI and Anthropic’s latest headlinesAlways read the fine printGary MarcusMay 21, 202669218ShareOpenAI scored a big result yesterday, with respect to an Erdos problem:OpenAI@OpenAIToday, we share a breakthrough on the planar unit distance problem, a famous open question first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. For nearly 80 years, mathematicians believed the best possible solutions looked roughly like square grids. An OpenAI model has now disproved that 7:06 PM · May 20, 2026 · 6.93M Views688 Replies · 2.64K Reposts · 19.2K LikesClearly impressive. But as with so much else, it should be viewed with skepticism.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (Newest).
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