Goalposts

Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?

2026 Julymeowface

About whether an AI counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture means math research went wrong.

This would seem to lead to absurd implications. What if in, say, 20 years, an AI is able to independently prove nearly everything important in under an hour, including the Riemann hypothesis, with no contamination from other proofs? (Let's say it's also free to write and run arbitrary code, as well.)

Whether it's 5, 10, 20, 50 years, obviously the takeaway cannot be "something had gone terribly wrong". The takeaway would be the smartest humans were never close to the theoretical intelligence and wisdom ceiling and never could've been. This will one day seem obvious in retrospect. There's no reason evolution by natural selection would've landed any species near such a ceiling.

An AI independently proves nearly everything important, including the Riemann hypothesis, in under an hour, without contamination from existing proofs.

Has this happened?

Yes 4 (3%)Not sure 16 (14%)No 95 (83%)

Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.