OpenAI releases 372 math results in one day, including an AI proof of the Unique Games Conjecture
LukeW · x · 2026-10-08
Scott Aaronson recounts what he calls the "Mathocalypse": OpenAI released 372 major mathematical results in a single day, among them a proof of the Unique Games Conjecture (UGC) posed by Subhash Khot — the statement that implies a wide class of optimization problems remain NP-hard even for approximations beyond semidefinite-programming relaxations. The results were greenlit by an advisory group including Timothy Gowers and Edward Witten, and some proofs come with Lean certificates. Yet nearly no human has understood any of these proofs yet; the race to read them has just begun. Complexity theorist Dana Moshkovitz, who has worked toward UGC her whole career, described the paper as "something written by someone who's on psychedelics" — so poorly written it's "impossible to read without AI help."
Related event: OpenAI Drops 372 Math Results Including Unique Games Conjecture Proof(4 posts)→
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