Last week, OpenAI shocked the mathematical community by revealing that one of its internal artificial intelligence models had found a counterexample to a famous conjecture made by legendary Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős in 1946. The planar unit distance problem, or Erdős problem 90 , has intrigued mathematicians for decades. The new result is no mere curiosity. Canadian mathematician Daniel Litt described it as “the first result produced autonomously by an AI that I find interesting in itself.” The breakthrough, produced with a general-purpose AI model rather than one specialized for mathematics , also highlights how AI is changing mathematical research itself. Days after OpenAI’s paper, US mathematician Will Sawin followed the same line of reasoning to an improved result . Also last week, a team from Google DeepMind used one of their own models to resolve nine lesser open problems left by Erdős.…