OpenAI solves Erdos

Apparently, an internal OpenAI model has disproved a discrete geometry problem that mathemeticians have spent the last 80 years studying.

The problem is deceptively “simple”: If you place n points in the the plane, how many pairs of points can be exactly distance 1 apart? The view of mathemeticians for the past 80 years has been a square grid is optimal for maximizing the number of pairs, but GPT took another approach. The LLM devised an “infinite family of examples that yield a polynomial improvement”.

I can’t say I understand the math behind the conjecture, or what GPT did, but this feels like a breakthrough with LLMs that I have not seen before. If an LLM can tackle an abstract math problem better than 80 years of leading mathematicians, what will it do next?