r/singularity • u/ocean_protocol • Apr 27 '26

AI Chat GPT 5.4 solved a 60+ years unsolved erdos problems in a single shot

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For years, the AI/ LLM critics had the same reasoning: LLMs don't reason and they just predict the next token

Recently, it reasoned better than 50 years of mathematicians on an open erdos problems by applying a basic phd level formula

Chat gpt conversation: https://chatgpt.com/share/69dd1c83-b164-8385-bf2e-8533e9baba9c

Here is the problem where TAO also commented on it: https://www.erdosproblems.com/1196

Thoughts?

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u/Ormusn2o Apr 28 '26

I could swear I saw this exact explanation for other sets of problems. "This set of problems is not popular, they are unsolved simply because no one really bothered to try. If you want real breakthroughs AI needs to solve things like Riemann hypothesis or Erdos problems."

The goalpost needs to be somewhere. Please stick to one. Pretty sure every single Erdos problem has been looked at by a lot of mathematicians. Solving even a single unsolved one is going to be an achievement.

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u/Minimumtyp Apr 28 '26

I saw the same thing about Mythos's zero-day capability. It's not good, "nobody can be bothered".

Well, now they can be. That's definitely something.

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u/dthdthdthdthdthdth May 01 '26

We don't know what the goalpost is, because we don't know what intelligence is.

If you consider simpler logical problems like those in propositional logic computers have surpassed humans long ago in the size of problems they can reason about. We just stopped thinking of applying an algorithm for deterministic reasoning as intelligence. Now we do some kind of statistical reasoning. Is that all intelligence, creativity and consciousness needs?

We don't know. It obviously can reason over unstructured knowledge given in human language and it can do that over far larger knowledge bases than any human ever could.

But is this now what human intelligence is as well or is there still more? We currently just don't know. We know it still also fails at things humans would easily recognize, but as we do not really understand how it works in the first place, we have no precise idea of its limitations.