Open AI solves a 1946 Erdős 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 belief, discovering an entirely new family of constructions that performs better.
- ▪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 belief, discovering an entirely new family of constructions that performs better.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | X (formerly Twitter) |
| Canonical URL | https://twitter.com/openai/status/2057176201782075690 |
| Publication time | Wed, 20 May 2026 22:32:11 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-20T22:45:03.049Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-20T22:45:03.049Z |
| 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 | VoSPmwju6cwb |
| 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
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 belief, discovering an entirely new family of constructions that performs better. This marks the first time AI has autonomously solved a prominent open problem central to a field of mathematics.00:007:06 PM · May 20, 202613.6MViews:host{display:inline-block;direction:ltr;white-space:nowrap;line-height:1}span{display:inline-block}:host([data-will-change]) span{will-change:transform}.number,.digit{padding:round(nearest, calc(var(--number-flow-mask-height, 0.25em) / 2), 1px)…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at X (formerly Twitter).
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