Is it takeoff?
Is it takeoff?
Published Oct 7, 2026 Wheels still on the ground.
Held short 1,406 days. Rolling since Oct 6, 2026.
We checked. On our own machine, Lean’s kernel accepts OpenAI’s proofs of two headline results, the Unique Games Conjecture and no zeros of the zeta function with real part above 7/8, against unmodified Mathlib. The zeta statement is one line of Mathlib. The Unique Games statement runs 239 lines and still deserves expert eyes.
OpenAI says an unreleased model wrote 722 research manuscripts, with results on 372 open problems, the Unique Games Conjecture among them, at about three hours of compute apiece. 162 come with Lean proofs of their main result. The rest are waiting on human readers.
Anthropic says Claude now leads 26% of its AI research and development work, up from under 1% in February. A person still supervises all of it.
OpenAI says it has its automated research intern: agents doing days of a researcher’s work under direction, 3.1 agent-workdays for every human one.
ChatGPT ships. People start asking the question daily.
This is an editorial assessment, not a live measurement. It moves when the evidence does.
What moves it: forward to V1 when an independent measure shows machines leading most AI research work; back to Hold short if the headline proofs fail to check, or their formal statements turn out to say less than the papers do.
We check so you don’t have to.