Agree. Additionally, it’s really disheartening that people do this with Erdos problems specifically. They are not major research questions in mathematics, but were intended as little conjectures that people could use as a way into serious number theory with a small cash reward and a little bit of minor fame for being the person who did the work to solve one of them. They are not things where the solution itself provides an amazing amount of insight or moves the frontier of mathematics forward particularly.
So what is happening now is people now are nuking and paving the whole space with AI to prove their model can do maths, and we are all poorer for having this nice thing ruined in this way.
Number theorist Jared Lichtman says this AI proof is from "The Book", the highest compliment one can give. He also says:
> I care deeply about this problem, and I've been thinking about it for the past 7 years. I'd frequently talk to Maynard about it in our meetings, and consulted over the years with several experts (Granville, Pomerance, Sound, Fox...) and others at Oxford and Stanford. This problem was not a question of low-visibility per-se. Rather, it seems like a proof which becomes strikingly compact post-hoc, but the construction is quite special among many similar variations.
> The conjecture is 60 years old and many experts had consulted on the problem, making partial progress. I mentioned this to @thomasfbloom, and he replied: "perhaps the first Book Proof from AI?"
Terence Tao says:
> In any case, I would indeed say that this is a situation in which the AI-generated paper inadvertently highlighted a tighter connection between two areas of mathematics (in this case, the anatomy of integers and the theory of Markov processes) than had previously been made explicit in the literature (though there were hints and precursors scattered therein which one can see in retrospect). That would be a meaningful contribution to the anatomy of integers that goes well beyond the solution of this particular Erdos problem.
- He previously posted on X on the 2025/10/17 the following:
> Hi, as the owner/maintainer of http://erdosproblems.com, this is a dramatic misrepresentation. GPT-5 found references, which solved these problems, that I personally was unaware of. The 'open' status only means I personally am unaware of a paper which solves it. [1]
> GPT-5 has been a very useful tool in searching the literature, and this has been a valuable addition to the website. Its literature searching ability is already useful and impressive enough, no need to describe it as something it's not! [2]
So what is happening now is people now are nuking and paving the whole space with AI to prove their model can do maths, and we are all poorer for having this nice thing ruined in this way.