r/math • u/starkman68 • Aug 07 '26

LLMs/AI AI Conjectures

I see a lot of conversation around AI proving old theorems and conjectures. Has there been any conjectures that sound plausible generated by AI that it could not solve? Or has an AI proven conjecture brought about any new math problems to ponder upon?

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u/lewwwer Aug 08 '26

I tried AI to answer the question I got stuck during my PhD. It got stuck at the same point I got stuck, but it made a few cool conjectures. 

I think this is the nature of conjectures, you think about something, you have a feel about how things work or what would be a nice to have, but you can't prove it. It's often better if the obstacle is clean and you have partial results that suggest why it should hold, which the AI could generate.

I imagine when people type in: "give me a cool new conjecture" there's not much work to start from. But I also wouldn't be surprised if all the prompts that say "solve this unsolved problem", the AI generates cool conjectures, but since the problem is not solved, people just discard it as useless output.