Summary
Fireship’s “The Code Report” recaps what it calls the summer mathematics fell to machines, cataloging a remarkable run of AI-assisted mathematical breakthroughs concentrated in a single season. The video traces the arc from OpenAI disproving an 80-year-old Erdős conjecture in May, through the Leiden Declaration signed by 16 researchers calling for guardrails on AI in mathematics research, to the July disproof of the Jacobian conjecture — a problem on Smale’s list of the hardest problems of the 21st century — with assistance from a model called Fabel.
The piece then covers a Columbia PhD student solving six open problems in five days, and researcher Dimitri Rybin using GPT-5.6 in four prompts to disprove the 30-year-old Garg-Gommans conjecture in graph theory. The biggest headline: OpenAI internally solved 10 open problems across mathematics and theoretical computer science, shipping all results to GitHub with Lean formal proof certificates — including an improvement to a sphere-packing bound unmoved since 1978. Anthropic countered with an announcement that an unreleased model made progress on the Riemann hypothesis, discovered by Bun.js creator Jared Sumner during a jog, using a Claude Code session that ran 60 sub-agents, 2,400 shell commands, and hundreds of Python scripts over a day and a half.
Terence Tao’s public warning of a “crisis in mathematical values” at the International Congress of Mathematicians frames the cultural stakes. Essential viewing for anyone tracking AI reasoning capabilities and their implications for scientific research.
📺 Source: Fireship · Published August 19, 2026
🏷️ Format: News Analysis
