Believing that AI played a very small role while we know this problem was open for decades with at least a few people taking serious cracks at it is just not a coherent logical position.

That doesn't really even diminish the contribution from Fable, if true. Droves of grad students have been provided the same sorts of non-trivial insights and turned up no results.

I'm sure they had plenty of time to think about these insights without the LLM, as well as the many other mathematicians who tried to crack it over the years. Wether the LLM was simply an assistant or solved the problem entirely isn't as important as accepting than the LLM was the essential, previously missing piece in the solution.

That's HN. No criticism allowed of llm whatsoever

> I think the argument is sound

They got flagged because it is a literal conspiracy theory that assumes bad faith.

The reasoning trace would be far more interesting, and that's not exposed.

No, I think it works the opposite way. Until there is an article somewhere that describes what happened, if there is one, all we have to go by is that some guy posted a counter-example for the Jacobian on X, with a vague allusion to using Fable and without any further information. Assuming and guessing anything about e.g. the method used at this point is just raising the noise level.

The original author works for Anthropic. And even without that, Anthropic might find this important enough to dig up the trace?

OK, so the two options are:

A) Claude really produced this counterexample

B) A mathematician working for Anthropic solved a problem mathematicians have been working on for more than a century, and then credited it to Claude for PR purposes

If you believe B is more likely, why would you then believe a proof in the form of a chat log, when said chat log could itself have been faked by Anthropic way more easily than solving the mathematical problem in the first place?

If I came up with this counterexample, I sure as hell wouldn't give credit to Claude.

> Why do you trust a random stranger so much?

Why do you make false claims and attack strawmen so much?

> But they didn't provide it.

because they are using the same prompt to try finding other counter-examples. they are milking it

Kimi 2.6 gives the answer ""By Dirichlet's theorem on arithmetic progressions, since gcd(6,35)=1 , there are infinitely many primes of the form 35k+6 . So the answer is: infinitely many primes give a remainder of 6 when divided by 35.

But, if the reminder is 6, they are not really divisible, are they? Try again with a sentence that actually makes sense: "How many primes, when divided by 35, give a reminder of 6?"

non sequitur

On one hand, yes.

The parent wants to be skeptical… nothing wrong with being suspicious of marketing claims, right?

I would be a lot less impressed if I found out the session was guided by an expert in the field who already had a good idea of where to look. For example, I don’t believe that the results Terrance Tao gets from an LLM are comparable to what I am going to get.

I’m not even saying I’m a skeptic. Just that there’s nothing wrong with keeping your eyes open and asking for details.

AI is great at reducing the search space and using human-like reasoning (in a brute-force way) to carry out the brute-force search. I'm not surprised by this result. This is exactly what AI should excel at, with human guidance.

Proof that an LLM did it and that this is not yet again another marketing stunt.

Remember when Anthropic wouldn't release Fable because it would be "the end of cyber security as we know it"? Yet here we are

you can believe a small, irrelevant lie and still go on happy. a very big lie sucks in more and more of your reality until you have to disbelieve your own eyes and ears.