Quanta Magazine

Among the 377 results that OpenAI announced on October 6, 2026, one stood out. It claimed to settle the “quasi-Riemann hypothesis” — a weaker version of the Riemann hypothesis, which is arguably the biggest open question in math. The new proof is, as Jared Duker Lichtman of Stanford University put it, “the most significant AI-for-math achievement so far, by quite a margin.

Benchmarks are the rulers of AI, in both senses of the word. As measuring sticks, they work according to an extremely simple logic: If you want to know what an AI model can do, devise a standardized test to gauge it. But AI benchmarks can also dominate the behavior of the entire field. In 1987, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s first benchmark on automatic speec...

People may think of soil as just dirt, but it is anything but inert. Beneath your feet, a vast network of mycorrhizal fungi is hard at work, trading minerals with plant roots. This trading system helps enrich the soil, and it sequesters 13 billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide each year — roughly equivalent to one-third of the world’s fossil-fuel emissions. Scientists kn...

About 65 million light-years from Earth, three galaxies don’t look quite right. They aren’t whirlpools bursting with light, but pallid objects dimly illuminated by a smattering of stars. “They have this ghostly appearance,” said Michael Keim, an astrophysicist at Yale University. And this isn’t even the weirdest thing about them. Dark matter is the invisible glue that keeps t...

Everything that’s swept the world since the 2022 release of ChatGPT — “the AI economy”; data centers; chatbots acting as best friends, doctors, and mathematicians; talk of existential risk — it all starts, in some sense, with an intern in a University of Montreal lab named Dzmitry Bahdanau. It was 2014. The 23-year-old Belarusian, who had been coding competitively since he wa...