The Real Story Isn't the Proofs—It's the Price Tag
OpenAI just dropped ten solved open math problems that stumped human mathematicians for decades—some since 1999. The headline result constructs the first-ever explicit non-sofic group, closing a 27-year-old question in group theory. All ten proofs are Lean-verified on GitHub with zero "sorry" placeholders. Impressive? Sure. But the number that matters isn't the ten solutions—it's the $2,000 price tag.
That's what OpenAI claims it cost in compute tokens at their Sol API rates to generate all ten results with Astra, the unreleased "next major model" built around multi-agent coordination and extended test-time reasoning. If that figure holds under scrutiny, we just crossed a threshold where AI-driven mathematical discovery became radically cheaper than the human alternative. A single postdoc year costs $60K–$80K in salary alone, not counting overhead. Ten problems that saw no progress for a decade—solved for the cost of a used Honda Civic.
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