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Moonshots · 3 min · Oct 15, 2026

Math is bulk-solved first because it is easiest to verify

Alexander Wissner-GrossHost

Founder, Reified

Has backed and advised 40+ tech companies, directly and through 021T Capital and Reified; writes The Innermost Loop.

  • Peter DiamandisHost · Founder, XPRIZE

    Co-founded Singularity University and founded Zero-G; co-wrote the books Abundance and Bold.

  • Salim IsmailHost · Founder, Open ExO

    Co-wrote Exponential Organizations; was Singularity University's founding executive director; sold Ångströ to Google.

  • Dave BlundinHost · Founder & GP, Link Ventures

    Has co-founded 23 companies; founding CEO of Vestmark and chairman of insurance marketplace EverQuote.

About this segment

Alex argues that OpenAI's 722-solution drop shows math has been bulk-solved, and that the same will hit science, engineering and medicine. Math came first because results are easiest to verify.

From “OpenAI Bulk-Solves 722 Math Problems, Anthropic’s Cruelty Policy, & Elon’s Quadrillion-Dollar SpaceX”, Oct 15, 2026. Watch the full episode

“It simply hit math first because math is easiest to verify. It's going to hit all of science. It's going to hit all of engineering, all of medicine”
Alexander Wissner-Grossat 42:51 · Moonshots42:51

Takeaways

  1. 81% of key math results from three years were published in one day
  2. Math falls first because it is the easiest field to verify
  3. Every field built on math is next: physics, chemistry, biology, medicine
Watch 2:56 from 41:45

In this episode

Full episode

  1. 41:45Math is bulk-solved first because it is easiest to verify2:56

  2. 57:03In-silico cures for 5,000 diseases may arrive in 2 to 3 years1:50Up next
  3. 1:08:02Curing disease is a path-planning search problem, not a mystery2:35

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 41:51

    And separately, for all of us who are not mathematicians, why is this relevant? I'd say it's a devastating day for the historic practice of mathematics and for mathematicians who were addicted to the old way of doing things professionally or personally. Which was what? What was the old way of doing things? Mathematicians as artisans. It's over. It's cooked. It's been flourished, if you prefer. It's over. Math is over as we've as it has been done historically. The new way of doing math is bulk solution. This is Peter, what you and I wrote about in Solve Everything. Math is.

  2. 42:30

    cooked. I'll repeat once more for those who haven't been paying close attention, math is cooked and every other field is about to be cooked. What mathematicians experienced in this past week, where by one measure 81% of the most important math results over the past three years were published in a single day, this is the tip of the iceberg. This is going to hit every single field. It simply hit math first because math is easiest to verify. It's going to hit all of science. It's going to hit all of engineering, all of medicine, and any practitioners, including mathematicians in the audience who are bellyaching, as it were, over how awful this is for the artisanal, romantic, humanized practice of math, get a life. It is over. AI has solved the field.

  3. 43:22

    AI is scalably solving the field. And this is exactly what we want. The field of math is set to flourish and be flourished because we're about to learn the answers to the mysteries of the mathematical universe to the extent that already in this first so-called slop drop, we haven't already. We're about to learn many, many more. This is only... Let me be blunt. Why does this matter? I mean, are these esoteric math problems? Do they have impact on things that we're going to be, you know, developing, discovering, and using in the next few years?

  4. 43:54

    It matters because math is the foundation for all of science and all of engineering. If we can solve math, which we now arguably have, we can solve everything else. That was the point to solve everything. Everything. Physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, the humanities even depend on math, even though they're in denial. It all depends on math. So this will be viewed, I think, as a historic watershed when suddenly an entire field of great import was bulk solved.

  5. 44:25

    And at the same time, a bunch of bellyachers in the field who were counting on personal glory and artisanry being rewarded, put together this association for human math.