John Loeber Reports Unreleased OpenAI Model Disproves Hadwiger Conjecture in Automated Theorem Proving

·2026.10.22 14:56

Key point

John Loeber describes the rapid transition to AI-dominated math, noting an unreleased OpenAI model disproved the Hadwiger Conjecture, while Navier-Stokes was resolved shortly after GPT-6 Astra's release.

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Details

  • An unreleased OpenAI frontier model disproved the Hadwiger Conjecture using a probabilistic argument for the existence of a counterexample graph. This result was part of a 'math repo' claiming hundreds of major results, generated after running the model against 4,000 major problems.
  • The model consumed approximately 3.5 hours of ChatGPT-Pro-Thinking equivalent compute per problem, estimated by John Loeber at $100 per problem.
  • Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness was resolved a few days after GPT-6 Astra's release, leading Loeber to stop his own efforts on the Hadwiger Conjecture as his work became trivial by comparison.
  • Loeber argues that sophisticated custom engineering, including a private Lean4 fork and custom harnesses, was rendered obsolete by base model improvements, rendering his ~1 million lines of Lean theorems pointless.
  • The transition to the 'AI-math era' was sudden rather than gradual, with the human-AI collaboration window lasting only about one summer before the field became entirely AI-dominated.
  • Approximately 50% of AI-generated results appear to be formalized in Lean after being generated in plaintext, a process Loeber finds 'insane' given the cognitive difficulty of maintaining consistency without formal verification.
  • The mathematical community is described as being in shock or denial, with the individual probability of making a major contribution dropping from 'slim' to 'zero' while access to discovered truths becomes limitless.
  • Loeber did not use quantitative evals like Frontiermath to measure progress, relying instead on impression, and notes that undecidable problems are excluded from the prospect of limitless AI answers.

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