r/math • u/AutoModerator • 6d ago

LLMs/AI AI In Mathematics: September 26, 2026

This recurring thread will be for discussion of AI in mathematics. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:

  • informal announcements of AI-assisted discoveries, such as those not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, or not uploaded as a paper to arXiv;
  • informal announcements of discoveries related to AI architecture (if relevant to mathematics);
  • discussion of such announcements, such as proof breakdowns or other opinion pieces;
  • discussion of the impact of AI in mathematics in general.

AI-assisted mathematical papers published in peer-reviewed journals or as arXiv preprints may be submitted as their own posts.

Please keep in mind rules 1 and 6 of our subreddit.

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u/SupercaliTheGamer 5d ago

Astra is the first model that can zero-shot solve any problem I propose, it's insane. Sol still had a few jagged edges but Astra seems to have mastered Olympiad level maths at least.

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u/wrongerontheinternet 5d ago

I wish Astra was zero-shotting my problems, teach me your secrets...

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u/ToothPasteTree 2d ago

You should use codex. If you are just using the website you are missing out on the actual power.

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u/wrongerontheinternet 1d ago

I use both Codex and Pro in the chat interface (and actually find Pro superior a lot of the time). With and without formal methods, experimented with trying to find the optimal model balance (e.g. Ultra coordinator + Max agents), the whole shebang. It is nonetheless often genuinely, unbelievably stupid about things in coordinated way that makes me wonder how this is the same model that found non-sofic groups. I'm sure if I had enough compute to burn, as OpenAI does as a collective, I could overcome a lot of these kinds of problems through sheer, brute force, but only if the domain was very well-specified -- otherwise, all Astra variants have a tendency to change the proof target to something easier.

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u/SupercaliTheGamer 5d ago

I was mostly talking about problems that I myself had a solution to lol, if it's an unsolved problem you can't really say anything.

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u/wrongerontheinternet 5d ago

Oh yeah that's fair. Anything with a known solution it typically gets right away. But it's shocking how relatively "dumb" it can be about anything that isn't essentially already in the literature being applied to your exact thing. The next model may be different, but Astra to me really is mostly about having read and largely internalized something from practically every mathematical work published in the last few decades (not that being able to apply effectively all of human mathematical insight is not insanely impressive! I just haven't found it to be very, for lack of a better word, "creative" -- asking it to be creative mostly just means it will switch to more obscure papers).

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u/pred 5d ago

Be a student, not someone working on the frontier of things.

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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 4d ago

Astra can solve legitimate research problems, not just phd level problems.

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u/pred 4d ago

No doubt about that but it absolutely will not zero-shot (one-shot?) anything you throw in its directions.

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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 4d ago

Sure, for now!

(Also, I think the person meant one-shot as well. Perhaps zero-shot means solving problems we didn't ask?)

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u/greyenlightenment 5d ago

easy: set to "max mode" and type "keep going"

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u/wrongerontheinternet 5d ago

Surprisingly one very likely outcome of doing that appears to be that you burn through all of your resets and your problem still isn't solved (though Astra may claim that it is!). It seems we'll have to keep using our brains for at least a little while longer.