Mathematician: in 6 months AI went from 'slop' to finishing proofs that take me months

RexDouglass · x · 2026-09-10

Mathematician ObhishekSaha traces AI's leap in his field: in May, the best public models still produced "absolute slop"; the Erdos unit distance problem jolted mathematicians; his first AI-assisted theorem proof (ChatGPT 5.5 Pro, early June) felt like "a competent, indefatigable PhD student"; Sol in July stepped up again. Today he gives Astra a bare proof sketch — sometimes less — and gets a correct, complete (if terribly written) argument within hours, work that would take him weeks or months, plus mostly autonomous formalization. Quote-tweets Noam Brown: OpenAI mathematicians and physicists had their "Lee Sedol moment" watching the model solve open problems they'd struggled with for years, in minutes.

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