That’s a really fantastic capability, but not super surprising.
Terence Tao maintains a list [1] of AI attempts (successful and otherwise). #205 is currently the only success in section 1, the "full solution for which subsequent literature review did not find new relevant prior partial or full solutions" section - but it is in that section.
As to speed, as far as I know the recent results are all due to GPT 5.2, which is barely a month old, or Aristotle, which is a system built on top of some frontier LLMs and which has only been accessible to the public for a month or two. I have seen multiple mathematicians report that GPT-5.2 is a major improvement in proof-writing, e.g. [2]
[1] https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contribution...
- the long tail aspect of the problem space ; 'a "long tail" of under-explored problems at the other, many of which are "low hanging fruit" that are very suitable for being attacked by current AI tools'
- the expertise requirement, literature review but also 'Do I understand what the key ideas of the solution are, and how the hypotheses are utilized to reach the conclusion?' so basically one must already be an expert (or able to become one) to actually use this kind of tooling
and finally the outcomes which taking into consider the previous 2 points makes it very different from what most people would assume as "AI contributions".
For example if somebody had used GPT2 with the input dataset of GPT5.2 (assuming that's the one used for Erdos problems) rather than the input dataset it had then, could it have solved those same problems? Without doing such tests it's hard to say if it moved fast, or at all. It's not because something new has been solved by it that it's new. Yes it's a reasonable assumption, but it's just that. So going for that to assuming "it" is "moving fast" is just a belief IMHO.
