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Lore Laundering Machines - by Ben Recht - arg min

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Last weekend, researchers from OpenAI took the hyperbolic overpromotion of their chatbots a bit too far, only to be embarrassed by an ensuing pile-on. They claimed their software had “found” solutions to “open” math problems, only for it later to be revealed that “found” did not mean solved, and “open” did not mean unsolved. The party started when researcher Mark Sellke announced that he and a collaborator had used ChatGPT to find the solutions to ten open “Erdős” problems. These problems were named after Paul Erdős, a legendary Hungarian mathematician who both closed and opened problems prolifically (likely because he was famously always high on amphetamines). Erdős’ problems were usually closer to tricky math puzzles than long-standing conjectures like the twin prime conjecture or the Riemann Hypothesis. Nonetheless, they gave mathematicians plenty to think about, and working on them pushed the boundaries of number theory, probability, and combinatorics. Erdős often sweetened the pot

Lore Laundering Machines When insight comes from willful forgetting. Ben Recht Oct 24, 2025 54 14 7 Share Last weekend, researchers from OpenAI took the hyperbolic overpromotion of their chatbots a bit too far, only to be embarrassed by an ensuing pile-on. They claimed their software had “found” solutions to “open” math problems, only for it later to be revealed that “found” did not mean solved, and “open” did not mean unsolved. The party started when researcher Mark Sellke announced that he and a collaborator had used ChatGPT to find the solutions to ten open “Erdős” problems. These problems

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