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AI Is Powerful Enough to Crack Our Hardest Math Problems—and Kill Us All
The Wall Street Journal ^ | Sept. 11, 2026 9:00 pm ET | Ben Cohen

Posted on 09/12/2026 11:54:21 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum

You don’t need to know any math to understand why the Millennium Prize breakthrough matters. It’s proof of AI’s accelerating and terrifying progress.

Why should we care that AI is suddenly insanely good at math?

It’s a question that I’ve been asking mathematicians and AI researchers for months, and especially this week, when OpenAI published a solution to one of the notoriously complex Millennium Prize Problems.

And it’s the one math question I can answer without breaking into a cold sweat.

Math is many things to many people: beautiful, elegant, nightmare fuel. Over the past year, it has also become proof of artificial intelligence’s rapidly accelerating progress, showing how the technology is getting much smarter, much faster than most people anticipated.

It’s a field where skeptics predicted that AI wouldn’t reach the most ambitious benchmarks for years—and AI has already surpassed them. If that can happen in a domain that requires the highest levels of reasoning, it can happen anywhere.

Humans have always used math to understand the world.

AI’s progress in math is now giving us a peek at a world beyond our comprehension.

And this week, as we marveled at AI’s ability to do math, we also wondered if AI is going to destroy humanity.

At the same time OpenAI published its solution to a Millennium Prize Problem, a top scientist at Anthropic put out a very different kind of math: his belief that the chances of human extinction in the next decade are now greater than 10%. He was responding to explosive comments from another researcher, Jacob Coxon, who worked at OpenAI and Anthropic but said neither company is acting responsibly as they sprint to self-improving superintelligence and risk our very existence.

Meanwhile, their mathematical arms race keeps escalating.

This is not because...

(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...


TOPICS: Computers/Internet; Science
KEYWORDS: aiscaremongering; handwringing

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1 posted on 09/12/2026 11:54:21 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

You don’t need to know any math to understand why the Millennium Prize breakthrough matters

- - - - - - -

It looks like they plagiarized from a mathematician that solved it first.


2 posted on 09/12/2026 11:55:32 AM PDT by TTFX
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

AI is no where near smart.

I’m on Fabel 5.1 12 hours a day and I’m here to tell you it’s stupid.

It’s nothing more than a giant database.


3 posted on 09/12/2026 11:59:11 AM PDT by NoLibZone (If people in NYC don't care why should we? No more red blood for blue cities.)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

I like this guy’s take. More at the link.

If you are fully vaxed and boosted, you probably won’t get this.

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2098353780269920620?s=20

Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱
@Kristof_Poland

The Second World Scam

COVID was the first global scam. AI scaremongering will most likely be the second.

There is a historical joke here. What we call World War I was originally just the Great War. Nobody numbered it, because nobody expected another one. Only the second made the first “First.” Global scams will follow the same convention. The Great World Scam is behind us, and we are living in the inter-scam era.

The formula was simple: take a real phenomenon, exaggerate its scale, dominate the information environment, then sell extraordinary measures as the only responsible choice. The virus was dangerous enough to frighten people and nowhere near dangerous enough to justify the response.

If it worked once, someone will try again. But not with another virus – too many people have learned the game. And the ideal racket needs panic without destruction. You cannot milk a dead cow. Governments do not need dead subjects. They need productive ones. That is also why war is becoming a clumsy tool: why destroy wealth you can redistribute?

Climate is too slow – a catastrophe permanently scheduled for the future works as a framework, not as a racket.

AI is the perfect candidate. It is real, powerful, fast, and almost impossible for ordinary people to verify. And it concerns information itself – the clearest lesson of COVID was that whoever controls information controls interpretation.

The script almost writes itself. First come years of warnings from scientists, CEOs and former insiders. Then a series of incidents: a self-driving car kills, a chatbot blackmails, an algorithm crashes a market. Some are real, some exaggerated, some staged, and for the narrative the difference hardly matters. Then dramatic resignations. These are already happening. Then the big event: networks down, banks frozen, grids flickering. Nobody knows whether it was AI, sabotage or a bug – so whoever controls the narrative decides.

Then comes the solution: certified operating systems, digital ID, licensed hardware, bans on open-source models, limits on encryption, and remote kill switches in every processor. Every measure is a new market, and every market a new fortune. Fear first, control second, profit third.

AI does not need to be invented. Only the catastrophe does. The accident becomes an emergency, the emergency becomes a measure, and the measure becomes permanent – the only part of any emergency that never ends.

World wars were numbered. Why not world scams?


4 posted on 09/12/2026 11:59:27 AM PDT by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda est)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

Do an internet search for:

“Why would you ruin your career?” “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”


5 posted on 09/12/2026 11:59:31 AM PDT by TTFX
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

47.....


6 posted on 09/12/2026 12:01:21 PM PDT by blackdog (The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.)
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To: TTFX
It looks like they plagiarized from a mathematician that solved it first.

Let's ask Grok about that. 🤡


7 posted on 09/12/2026 12:04:10 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum (Israel First. America... who cares?)
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To: TTFX

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/openai-claims-1m-math-breakthrough-but-gets-hit-with-plagiarism-allegations/ar-AA2c56Y7?ocid=BingNewsVerp


8 posted on 09/12/2026 12:07:12 PM PDT by Jamestown1630 ("A Republic, if you can keep it.")
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To: NoLibZone

All it does it predict the most-likely next token based on context passed in to it.


9 posted on 09/12/2026 12:07:56 PM PDT by dfwgator ("I am Charlie Kirk!")
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

Right now AI is the Wild , Wild West

There is absolutely no oversight, anything goes and even a lot of the key developers don’t not fully understand the technology and its implications

We are going to learn some hard lessons because AI is going to be used in all sorts of of offensive and defensive situations


10 posted on 09/12/2026 12:08:40 PM PDT by rdcbn1 (..when poets buy guns, tourist season is over................Walter R. Mead)
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To: FreedomPoster

And there are some great comments there. Earlier scams were global warming/climate change and the financial bailout of 2008. So arguably AI is really Global Scam IV, after those two and the scamdemic.


11 posted on 09/12/2026 12:08:41 PM PDT by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda est)
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To: TTFX

A ‘top’ scientist?

Nope. A four month long working loser who quit.

Coxen is a 27-year-old engineer, not a globally recognized academic pioneer, a department director, or a Chief Scientist. He didn’t invent the foundational math behind AI. To some critics, his viral resignation felt like “sanctimonious doomer posting” from a mid-level employee.


12 posted on 09/12/2026 12:09:13 PM PDT by Alas Babylon! (The greatest power the media has is the power to ignore.)
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To: FreedomPoster

Not to mention “Cash for Clunkheads.”


13 posted on 09/12/2026 12:21:59 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum (Israel First. America... who cares?)
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To: dfwgator

You may win the prize for the most concise yet accurate layman’s explanation of Gen AI.

My explanation is that GenAI breaks takes a prompt and assigns each word (technically tokens) a meaning and a ranking of the attention/relative importance. From there, this analysis is bounced against giant a correlation matrix of the probability of one word following another word. The model then generates a response on a word by word basis, where the next word is based on the previous word.


14 posted on 09/12/2026 12:24:17 PM PDT by DoodleBob (Gravity's waiting period is about 9.8 m/s²)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum
Foundational Truth is revealed by Faith through Grace and can NOT be infused into AI.

We are at risk of being lead by Godless decisions.

15 posted on 09/12/2026 12:24:41 PM PDT by G Larry (Crushing Israel's biggest enemy is upsetting many!)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

the guy who told the story had not worked for anthropic long enough to find the bathrooms.


16 posted on 09/12/2026 12:28:57 PM PDT by ckilmer (`61)
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To: dfwgator
All it does it predict the most-likely next token based on context passed in to it.

When you think about it, the purpose of natural intelligence — in whatever animal — is to predict the future.

17 posted on 09/12/2026 12:29:41 PM PDT by Steely Tom ([Voter Fraud] == [Civil War])
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To: DoodleBob

The difference is now computers have the computational power to do it, at a fast rate.

And over time, it won’t take those behemoth data centers, it will be embedded in your laptop, or even cellphone.


18 posted on 09/12/2026 12:46:30 PM PDT by dfwgator ("I am Charlie Kirk!")
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

A nuke run by a human could too


19 posted on 09/12/2026 12:51:17 PM PDT by goodnesswins (Most Congress Critters should be referred to as what they are....LOOTERS)
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To: dfwgator

And spell-check still sucks - so, there is that...


20 posted on 09/12/2026 12:51:40 PM PDT by Empire_of_Liberty
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