[lesostep]

I am cautious about AI "discoveries" after Mythos paper.

What was the process of a writing a paper? Was the question asked by a mathematician? Was the paper right from a get-go or was there someone who pointed out mistakes?

How much attempts were made before solution was found?

I will eat my words if an AI oneshotted that one without any external help, but for know I am left wandering whether it's a new way to attribute discoveries to companies instead of people who put the work in

[andy12_]

> Was the question asked by a mathematician?

As per the report, the prompt used to solve the problem is AI-written and the solution was initially graded by an AI grading pipeline. They don't say this explicitly, but it seems like OpenAI has an automatic pipeline where they prompt models for solutions to famous math problems (which wouldn't be unexpected given how flashy a solution to a famous math problem looks)

> Was the paper right from a get-go or was there someone who pointed out mistakes?

Also as per the report, the output of the model isn't really a "paper"; it's a very terse 2 page solution which is apparently correct. The paper was later written based on this solution to make it more presentable.

> How much attempts were made before solution was found?

Given that this appears to be from an automated pipeline, I would say that it had many attempts. But either way, the blogpost says that with enough test-time compute, the model finds this same solution 50% of the time.

[1] https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/74c24085-19b0-4534-9c90-465b8e29a...

[0xDEAFBEAD]

>I am cautious about AI "discoveries" after Mythos paper.

Can you be more specific? I'm still under the impression that Mythos was a huge deal:

https://xcancel.com/hlntnr/status/2052479493801975987

[fontain]

There is little evidence that Mythos is any better at finding bugs than any other system. Mythos appears to be impactful because people are, for the first time, using lots of resources (for free from Anthropic) to try and find security issues. The actual bugs found are mostly inconsequential, any chart showing a giant leap in fixes that doesn’t consider whether they were even using any tooling before and whether these are serious issues is junk. If you read the partner’s summaries of Mythos so far, it is a damp squib. Maybe that’ll change but at least for now there is no evidence Mythos is anything but marketing hype.

https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-evaluation-of-claude-mythos...

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/11/mythos-finds-a-curl-v...

[rithdmc]

> I will eat my words if an AI oneshotted that one without any external help

like having a colleague peer review your paper, or bouncing ideas off a mentor before you write them down?

I agree there's a lot of AI marketing BS at the moment, but revising approaches based on feedback is a good thing.

[lesostep]

Yes, and no. As someone who had studied and had taught math, I really like peer review.

But peer review is a powerful tool.

Carefully choosing what lemmas to give for solving and reviewing the result is my favorite way to teach young minds. Yes, they do solve most problems themselves. But, most of them likely wouldn't be able to do that before someone dissects problem beforehand and points at weak spots in their explanations.

And that's why I question who prompted the model, how they prompted it, and how much their own ideas influenced the output.

I admit, I don't know enough to judge how much of the right solution was actually enclosed in a first reply

[crnkofe]

I'm also wondering about the process. What was the prompt, what they fed into the model, what it was trained on, etc. The article reads like a marketing post.

Nevertheless new maths is exciting and might lead to what I find slightly more interesting - new physics.

[utopiah]

No need to be cautious.

If a for-profit (because... you know, OpenAI isn't at all what it initially was) huge corporation (again, not a cute startup trying to help humanity) publish anything it's a piece of marketing. Every single word a corporation say is marketing.

So... that's also that, a piece of marketing to sell more of whatever their potential client can buy. It's not a piece of research. It's an ad. That's it.