a16z Infra Partner Lisha Li sits down with OpenAI mathematicians Mehtaab Sawhney and Mark Sellke to discuss how quickly AI’s mathematical capabilities are advancing, what recent results reveal about model reasoning, and what happens when AI begins making progress on problems mathematicians have struggled with for decades.

Mehtaab and Mark unpack several recent results from OpenAI’s models, including advances in sphere packing and the construction of a non-sofic group. They explain why the surprising part isn’t simply that models can search more possibilities or work longer than humans: in many cases, the reasoning traces look remarkably similar to the work of an expert mathematician, including choosing promising approaches, backtracking when they fail, and combining ideas from across the literature.