AI Has Turned Ignorance into an Advantage

Today, I ran into two things—one that made this era feel a little unreal, and one that made it feel very real. I. A 23-Year-Old Outsider Cracked a 60-Year-Old Conjecture Liam Price, 23, with no advanced mathematical training. On a Monday afternoon a week ago, he casually tossed an unsolved Erdős problem to GPT-5.4 Pro. Problem #1196, a conjecture about "primitive sets," had stumped humans for 60 years. In a single session of about 80 minutes, the model produced a proof. Cambridge un...