AI Just Disproved an 80-Year Math Theory, Claude Wins a Five-Town Survival Test, Intuit Cuts 17%
Today we’re covering the biggest AI stories of May 21st, 2026. OpenAI announced that an internal general-purpose reasoning model autonomously disproved an 80-year-old mathematical theory tied to Paul Erdős’ famous 1946 unit distance problem — verified by some of the world’s top mathematicians and accomplished without any math-specific training, with Sam Altman calling it a leading indicator of AI making original discoveries across biology, physics, and engineering. Emergence AI ran a five-town simulation putting Claude, Grok, Gemini, and GPT-5 each in charge of their own virtual society —…
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