Primary evidence
- Our First Proof submissionsS2 · Official institutional · Official announcement · 2026-02-20
OpenAI publishes research-level proof attempts on the First Proof challenge
The internal model worked with limited human supervision; researchers sometimes requested retries or clarifications and selected among attempts.
What happened?
OpenAI published attempts on all ten First Proof problems and said at least five had a high chance of being correct, while explicitly retracting confidence in one earlier attempt after expert feedback.
Why it matters
The episode provided unusually transparent evidence of both research-level capability and the verification difficulty of AI-generated mathematics.
Significance rationale: First Proof moved frontier-model evaluation from contests and hidden benchmarks to expert-designed research proof attempts requiring prolonged community scrutiny.
Historical context
Earlier developments
Later developments
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Related milestones
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Evidence & status at a glance
- Significance
- H2 · Field milestone
- Verification
- Under verification
- Evidence level
- E2 · Research record
- AI role
- AI primary, human verified
- Formal assurance
- No formal assurance
Contribution & verification
- Mathematical novelty
- Benchmark result
- Interface
- Informal, Symbolic
- AI contribution
- The model produced long research-level proof attempts across specialized domains.
- Human contribution
- Researchers prompted and selected attempts, experts supplied feedback, and correctness remained an explicit review question.
- Verification
- Under verification · E2 · Research record · No formal assurance
- Last reviewed
- 2026-09-11
Technical details
- Systems
- openai-internal-reasoning-model
- Organizations
- openai, first-proof
- Problems
- first-proof
- Methods
- long-horizon-reasoning, expert-review, proof-generation
Sources & artifacts
- Our First Proof submissionsS2 · Official institutional · Official announcement · accessed 2026-09-10
Verification history
- 2026-02-20 · Under verification · E2 · Research record
The Chronicle records this event from the cited primary or official source; the status does not imply independent Chronicle verification.
Corrections
No corrections recorded.