OpenAI is solving decades-old math problems. An Israeli startup is taking a different route

Artificial intelligence is making increasingly ambitious incursions into mathematics, but not all of the companies pursuing that goal are taking the same path.

OpenAI has unveiled solutions to 377 mathematical problems that had remained unsolved, spanning areas including algebra, number theory, computer science, mathematical logic and topology. Some of the results involve three of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, while one of the problems apparently cracked is the Riemann hypothesis, a famous question concerning the distribution of prime numbers.

The scale of the effort is striking. But perhaps more interesting is what comes next.

While OpenAI is demonstrating what a powerful general-purpose AI model can accomplish across hundreds of difficult mathematical problems, Israeli startup doubleAI is pursuing a more specialized approach. Its goal is to build AI systems that can operate as experts in mathematics and other technical fields rather than simply answer questions posed to them.

That approach was put to the test this week when doubleAI announced that one of its systems had made what it describes as the first improvement in 38 years on a central problem in extremal graph theory.

The company's Double Agent system produced an explicit construction of regular graphs that improves the so-called girth coefficient from 4/3 to 8/5, moving it closer to the theoretical maximum of 2.