Inside the Secret Meeting Where Mathematicians Struggled to Outsmart AI (Scientific American)
30 renowned mathematicians spent 2 days in Berkeley, California trying to come up with problems that OpenAl's o4-mini reasoning model could not solve... they only found 10. Excerpt: By the end of that Saturday night, Ono was frustrated with the bot, whose unexpected mathematical prowess was foiling the group’s progress. “I came up with a problem which experts in my field would recognize as an open question in number theory—a good Ph.D.-level problem,” he says. He asked o4-mini to solve the question. Over the next 10 minutes, Ono watched in stunned silence as the bot unfurled a solution in real time, showing its reasoning process along the way. The bot spent the first two minutes finding and mastering the related literature in the field. Then it wrote on the screen that it wanted to ...
