The AIs are “One of Us”
A general purpose AI model from OpenAI has solved the unit distance problem, a significant conjecture in mathematics. This achievement has garnered attention from prominent mathematicians, highlighting the AI's ability to explore complex problems in ways humans may overlook. While the proof was improved by human researchers, it marks a notable milestone in the intersection of AI and mathematics.
- ▪The AI produced a solution to the unit distance problem, one of Paul Erdős's favorite questions.
- ▪This problem has been a topic of interest for mathematicians since Erdős first posed it in 1946.
- ▪The AI's success demonstrates its capacity to explore unconventional paths and combine various mathematical theories.
Marginal Revolution files mainly under finance. We currently carry 103 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Marginal Revolution |
| Canonical URL | https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/05/the-ais-are-one-of-us-now.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-ais-are-one-of-us-now |
| Publication time | Thu, 21 May 2026 11:19:03 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-21T11:21:10.973Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-21T11:21:10.973Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The AIs are “One of Us” by Alex Tabarrok May 21, 2026 at 7:19 am in Current Affairs Science A general purpose AI model from OpenAI has produced a (dis)proof of an important conjecture. Tim Gowers writes: AI has now solved a major open problem — one of the best known Erdos problems called the unit distance problem, one of Erdos’s favourite questions and one that many mathematicians had tried. A number of prominent mathematicians comment. I enjoyed Thomas Bloom’s comments: This was one of Erdős’ favourite problems – he first asked it in 1946 [14] and returned to it many times.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Marginal Revolution.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Marginal Revolution
