ChatGPT Solves 50-Year Math Problem - TCR 05/16/26

ChatGPT closed a 50-year-old Erdős conjecture in 80 minutes that a Stanford mathematician had worked on intermittently for seven years, while a Cell paper showed spinach chloroplasts producing energy inside living mouse retinas.

https://sharedsapience.com/the-century-report-may-16-2026/

Mark Sellke fed Erdős Problem 1196 to ChatGPT with a code interpreter attached. Roughly 80 minutes later the model returned a structural proof that checked out, on a question he had been chipping away at for seven years. The model worked through candidate constructions, ran small computational checks, and assembled an argument Sellke had been unable to build on his own. The first half of mathematical discovery - the years-long conjecture-and-test loop that bounded the discipline for centuries - just folded into a session. The Erdős registry has hundreds of problems in the same register.

In the same news cycle, a team publishing in Cell transplanted spinach chloroplasts into the photoreceptor cells of living mice, and the plant organelles produced ATP and NADPH for several days inside mammalian tissue. The kingdom boundary held to be uncrossable since Aristotle held less firmly than the textbooks said, and retinal dystrophy now has a structural answer to its energy-demand bottleneck. A Würzburg team identified vitamin B2 as the cofactor cancer cells exploit to evade ferroptosis, with a candidate molecule already in hand. A NASA-led team demonstrated a radiation-hardened neuromorphic chip running on-orbit inference 500x faster than current spaceflight computers. A Phase III trial showed the oral antiviral ensitrelvir cutting symptomatic COVID in exposed household contacts from 9 percent to 2.9 percent.

The friction layer arrived in the same window. Detroit’s three legacy automakers have eliminated more than 20,000 U.S. salaried positions since 2022, with Ford’s CEO saying AI will absorb roughly half the company’s remaining white-collar workforce. And Federal Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin declined final approval of Anthropic’s $1.5 billion author copyright settlement after objectors challenged the $320 million legal fee against per-book payouts of about $3,000.

Additional Reading:

* BBC: Erdős Problem 1196 - Can AI now solve maths that no human can?: https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/p0nlhsn5

* Nature: Mouse eyes photosynthesize after plant-to-animal transplant: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01559-9

* ScienceDaily: Scientists discover vitamin B2 may help cancer cells survive: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260515002158.htm

* ScienceDaily: NASA’s new AI space chip could let spacecraft think for themselves: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260515002134.htm

* CNBC: Detroit automakers have cut more than 20,000 U.S. salaried jobs as AI threat looms: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/15/general-motors-ford-stellantis-job-cuts-ai.html

* Ars Technica: Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement is getting messy as judge delays approval: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/authors-fight-for-higher-payouts-from-anthropics-1-5b-copyright-settlement/

* Shared Sapience - The Century Report March 7, 2026 (GPT-5.4 FrontierMath): https://sharedsapience.com/the-century-report-march-7-2026/

* Shared Sapience - The Century Report May 9, 2026 (Cloudflare layoffs): https://sharedsapience.com/the-century-report-may-9-2026/

Want to track and verify all the “everything is changing” claims I’m making? I just launched a public Progress & Claims Tracker that logs breakthroughs, slowdowns, and outright contradictions, so my own theses can be challenged by the evidence as it lands. Check it out. And hey, why not subscribe while you’re there?https://sharedsapience.com/progress-and-claims-tracker/

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