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Google’s Jeff Dean Exits, SpaceX Hits $100B in Rev & OpenAI’s Astra Solves Decade-Old Math Problems with Emad Mostaque | EP #277
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OpenAI's Astra Solves Decade-Old Math: The Midnight of Mathematics
At 45:24 · chapter starts 42:20
Peter Diamandis presents the week's most stunning scientific story: OpenAI published a 249-page manuscript describing 10 genuinely new results across mathematics and theoretical computer science, produced by the as-yet-unreleased Astra model [1] — Peter Diamandis "OpenAI's unreleased Astra model produced a 249-page manuscript solving 10 open problems in mathematics — including high-dimensional geometr…" 45:00 . The total compute cost: roughly $2,000 — less than a graduate student's monthly stipend. Fields Medalist Tom Gowers said he'd have accepted the proofs for a top journal without hesitation. Cosmologist Will Kenney called it 'the slaughter of the old gods.' Alex Wissner-Gross responds with barely contained delight: this is exactly what he and Peter predicted in their book Solve Everything, and math is now 'bulk solved.' Both Alex and Emad signal awareness of near-term physics breakthroughs without being able to discuss specifics. Salim reframes the story structurally: when scarcity-based professional identity collides with abundance, the legacy collapses — as it did for photographers and taxi dispatchers. The bottleneck moves upstream: what problems are worth solving? Alex pushes back on the 'humans turn inward' thesis, arguing instead for an outward boom — AI solving physics and materials science creates the foundation for humanity's expansion into the cosmos.
OpenAI's unreleased Astra model produced a 249-page manuscript solving 10 open problems in mathematics — including high-dimensional geometry, coding theory, and quantum complexity — for a total compute cost of $2,000. Fields Medalist Tom Gowers said he'd have accepted the proofs for a top journal without hesitation. Math as a profession is structurally cooked.
OpenAI's forthcoming Astra model solved 10 open mathematics problems spanning high-dimensional geometry, coding theory, and quantum complexity for a total compute cost of approximately $2,000.
The AI-driven collapse of mathematics is a wavefront, not an isolated event. Both Alex Wissner-Gross and Emad Mostaque predict a physics breakthrough before the end of the year — and Emad goes further, predicting one within months. When physics gets solved, everything downstream — materials science, chemistry, biology — follows.
