In October 2025, the OpenAI team made a bold claim: GPT-5 had successfully tackled ten mathematical problems set forth by the renowned mathematician Erdős, an announcement that quickly drew significant attention across the globe.

However, mathematician Thomas Bloom soon stepped in to clarify the situation. He revealed that the majority of these problems had already been solved, but the solutions hadn't been promptly updated on the Erdős Problems Archive website. In essence, GPT-5 hadn't made any groundbreaking discoveries; instead, it had simply retrieved the existing answers through a literature search.

This revelation triggered a lukewarm, if not outright chilly, response from the research community. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis expressed his embarrassment, stating, "This is so embarrassing." In the wake of the controversy, the OpenAI team swiftly removed the related post. Sebastien Bubeck, a member of the team, also issued an apology, acknowledging that they had merely uncovered known solutions in the literature rather than generating original results.