Mathematicians have confirmed that OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 Pro model has proposed a new solution to the open problem No. 281 of Hungarian mathematician Pál Erdős. The solution to the problem was shared by Nil Somani, the founder of the Eclipse platform for scaling Ethereum. The solution was stated to be formulated by GPT-5.2 Pro.
The proof was officially published in the Erdős list of famous problems in combinatorics and number theory with the note “Provided by Somani using ChatGPT.” The list contains more than a thousand conjectures, of which about 400 have been proven so far.
Terence Tao, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and Fields Medal winner, confirmed the correctness of the solution, calling it “one of the clearest examples of artificial intelligence solving an open mathematical problem.” According to him, the proof provided by GPT-5.2 Pro is significantly different from previous theories and has no analogues in other popular AI models.
Note that this is the third Erdös problem to be “solved” by artificial intelligence models. Two previous problems were proven by Harmonic’s neural network called Aristotle.
